The United States vs. International Marijuana Laws

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This is a good article from NORML New Zealand that talks about the effect that the United States government has had on international marijuana laws.

Global Bully Throws Its Weight Around
Date: Monday, July 01 2002

NORML News Winter 2002
by Harry Cording

Throughout the sorry history of prohibition, the USA has not been content with oppressing its own citizens. It has also used its power to compel other countries to follow its disastrous drug policies.

A favorite tactic is threats of trade sanctions - which could be an explanation for the lack of action from the Health Select Committee cannabis enquiry. It has been over six months since the hearings finished - with an overwhelming number of public submissions in favor of law reform and mountains of evidence on the damage done by prohibition. Yet no report has been produced, and the government apparently wants to shelve the issue until after the election.

Meanwhile the prime minister has been busy sucking up to the USA, pledging support for the American "war on terror" in Afghanistan, meeting with George W. Bush at the White House, trying to gain a "free trade" agreement with America, and pushing for field trials of genetically engineered crops. Is there a connection here? Did George W. Bush "send a message" to Helen Clark to back off cannabis law reform?

Other countries which have moved toward liberalising their drug laws have felt American pressure to back down - as some of them have. Holland is an exception - it is not dependent on American aid or vulnerable to economic pressure. All the American drug warriors can do about the relaxed Dutch approach to cannabis is to tell outrageous lies about it. Similarly, Switzerland and other European countries have liberalised their marijuana laws without American sanctions.

Canada is a different story. The Canadian parliament's Special Committee on Illegal Drugs has been conducting hearings on marijuana, more far reaching than New Zealand's. Its recent report finds no convincing evidence that smoking pot leads to using harder drugs, and marijuana does not induce users to commit other crimes, or engage in risky activity such as driving quickly. It concludes that Canada's cannabis laws are ineffective and millions of dollars in public money being spent to combat pot is wasted.

"When you examine cannabis usage among youth, you realize that public policy has absolutely no effect," said Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, committee chairman. 1.5 million Canadians have a criminal record for simple possession. The U.S. is closely watching the Canadian marijuana debate and is working behind the scenes to influence the outcome.

Colonel Robert Maginnis, a US government "adviser" on drug policy, described the conclusions as "a radical drug policy that we will not ignore in the long term" which would have "adverse consequences" - meaning trade sanctions.

Canada presents American prohibitionists with a problem. As Richard Cowan says, Canada is "too white to invade and too close to ignore".

Canada had been pushing ahead with plans to provide government grown medical marijuana to people with serious illnesses, but those efforts appear to have stalled. Fewer than 300 Canadians have received licenses to use medical mariuana, and the majority can smoke their own because enough government grown is not available yet.

The US has already given Canada a hard time over hemp crops, using absurdly small traces of THC as an excuse to hold up hemp products at the border.

Meanwhile, the US Drug Enforcement Agency has begun a disinformation campaign against BC bud, claiming there are thousands of growing operations in British Columbia and most of their output is destined for the USA. Like all drug war propaganda, this unsubstantiated claim ignores facts. Canada imports marijuana from Mexico, the Caribbean, and the USA, and most of the cannabis consumed in the US is grown domestically or is imported from Mexico. These conclusions are based on seizure data, the only data available on the cannabis supply.

Nepal is a prime example of the disastrous effects of American drug policies. Cannabis has been used in Nepal for thousands of years as an integral part of the country's religion and culture. Once a year the Nepalese would offer ganja to their Lord Shiva on his birthday Shivrati. In the 1960s and early 1970s the Nepalese got quite a chuckle out of the many Westerners who flocked to Nepal to smoke the famed Temple Ball hashish.

You could buy ganja from any number of licensed shops. The only law against the sacred herb was that you could not export it. If you were caught - say at the airport - you spent a night in jail and paid a 1000 rupee fine ($100US). The police would then offer to sell you back your hash with a warning that it was illegal to export. Nepal was a hippie Nirvana. There were no Nepalese heroin addicts and no opium was grown in Nepal.

According to Joseph Pietri, an American who lived in Nepal for many years, in 1973 Richard Nixon and the recently created DEA paid the king of Nepal (the late King Birendra) 50 million dollars to make marijuana and hashish illegal in Nepal. A huge black market for drugs was created. Nepal is now much poorer - none of the money went to the people - and the country now has a half million heroin addicts, methadone programs, and crack cocaine. The Nepalese royal family runs the heroin trade - heroin comes overland from Burma through India.

At the 1984 Olympics in LA the Nepalese soccer team was stopped by customs at the airport with a huge amount of heroin they were carrying for the royal family.

According to Petrie, "In 1986 Henry Kissinger and the DEA came to Nepal for a narcotics conference. Henry and his boys bought two kilos of heroin in a Kathmandu market. They deposited them on the desk of the Chief of Police and threatened to cut off all aid to Nepal if something was not done to stop the heroin trade. As a show for Kissinger, the chief had all foreigners arrested as well as Nepalese who were involved in the ganja trade when it was legal. Hundreds were arrested. Nepalese were tortured into confessions. I managed to slip out of the country. A year or so later the Chief of Police himself was arrested for heroin trafficking."

American drug policy ruined Nepal. In Southeast Asia as a whole the prohibition of marijuana and hashish has lead to massive hard drug addiction as it has in the USA - yet another sad example of how prohibition benefits only the narks and their allies.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Nice article