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Ref. : Civic Events
Ref. : Arts & Education Events
Ref. : Public Service Notices
05.17 Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality
05.17 Why Private Schools Are Dying Out
Ref. : Letters to the editor
05.20 Climate Change Denial is Costing us Trillions, Threatening Farming, Fishing, Animals (Video)
05.20 Blinding Us From Science
05.20 The Baltimore Lead Study [3:17 video]
05.19 A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit
05.18 Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection
05.17 The Murky World of Hospital Prices
05.17 New Jersey Hospital Is the Costliest in the Nation
05.17 Angelina Jolie has done something extraordinary
05.17 Obama must Make Fighting Climate Change National Project, or Die the death of a thousand Scandals
05.17 Study: Why Pot Smokers Are Skinnier
05.16 What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It?
05.16 How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach
05.15 Don't Look Now, but Our Medicare Spending Projections Are Plummeting
05.15 No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet
05.15 Why the world faces climate chaos
05.14 US Supreme Court finds for Monsanto in seed patent battle (Update 2)
05.13 Austerity and the Unraveling of European Universal Health Care
05.13 Global Warming: Halfway to a Mass Extinction Event?
05.13 Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus
05.12 The giants of the green world that profit from the planet's destruction
05.11 Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle
Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries
05.11 Ongoing rule: Once a demon, always a demon!
05.11 FCC: Fronting For Corporations?
05.11 FCC: Fronting For Corporations?
05.11 The news media is even worse than you think
Daily FAIR Blog
The Daily Howler
05.18 Senator wants U.S. in oil price-fixing probe
05.18 Timothy Geithner Is Key To IRS Scandal
05.16 Why Won't the SEC Rein In the Firms That Tanked America's Economy?
05.16 Elizabeth Warren to Obama Administration: Take the Banks to Court, Already!
05.15 The IRS should do more, not less, scrutinizing of political groups
05.15 Did the IRS illegally target the Tea Party? Seven questions answered.
05.14 IRS kept shifting targets in tax-exempt groups scrutiny: report
05.12 Authorities Announce tax Haven Investigation
05.17 The Great American Descent into Plutocracy
05.17 The Real Benghazi Scandal
05.16 Take Politics Away From the I.R.S.
05.16 Should 501(c)(4)’s Be Eliminated?
05.16 What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct'
05.12 The Assault on Food Stamps Takes Legislative Form, and Jamie Dimon Profits!
05.11 The Military’s 40-Year Experiment
05.11 Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less
05.11 'Purity' culture: bad for women, worse for survivors of sexual assault
05.11 At Least 71 Kids Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown
05.11 Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address [15:05 video]
05.11 The Good, the Bad and the Crazy [6:05 video]
05.20 Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills
05.20 Is EVERY Market Rigged?
05.19 Can two senators end ‘too big to fail’?
05.18 Pope blames tyranny of capitalism for making people miserable[1:00 video]
05.18 A Simple Graph That Should Silence Austerians and Gold Bugs Forever [graph]
05.18 The Savings Heist
05.18 Sheila Krumholz and Danielle Brian on How Money Rules Washington [20:31 video]
05.14 10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet
05.14 The Vicious New Bank Shakedown That Could Seriously Ruin Your Life
05.14 Neo-liberalism – the antithesis to democracy [charts]
05.14 Bloomberg: "Coup d’Etat to Trade Seen in Billionaire Toxic Lead Fight"
05.13 Mel Watt, Nominee to Head FHFA, Opposes Administration by Voting to Deregulate Derivatives
05.12 IRS Blunder Gives Republicans Ammunition in Effort to Defund the Agency
05.12 Visualizing the World’s Tax Havens [Infographic]
05.11 A New Era for Worker Ownership, 5 Years in the Making
Ref. : Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair [25:35 video]
Ref. : Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders
Ref. : We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income
05.19 Italy coalition: Thousands rally in Rome against cuts [graphic]
05.18 Hans Rosling: the man who's making data cool [3:19 video]
05.18 Washington gets explicit: its 'war on terror' is permanent
05.17 Egypt 'suffering worst economic crisis since 1930s'
05.16 Catholic Church Finally Decides That Austerity is Bad
05.15 Retirement: How They Do It Elsewhere
05.15 Europeans disillusioned and divided by debt crisis, survey finds
05.14 Interview: NATO Supreme Allied Commander on Syria and Soft Power
05.14 Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can
05.14 Cayman Islands Spars With Sachs Over Hedge Fund Directorships
05.13 Cornel West: 'They say I'm un-American'
05.13 27% of Spaniards are out of work. Yet in one town everyone has a job
05.11 U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars ... That It Will Publicly Admit
05.11 Tax evasion still crippling Africa as rich countries fail to deliver support
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THE UNITED NATIONS' 2006 WORLD DRUG REPORT:
UNODC Makes the Case for Ending Cannabis Prohibition—Inadvertently
That “news coverage” is often nothing more than regurgitated news releases is hardly news, of course. But completely missing a big story is news.
Granted, this year’s 6,100-ton Afghani opium harvest does deserve public attention. Poppy farmers in the southern provinces of Afghanistan have produced a bumper crop that will result in more heroin for sale around the world, and their runaway success signals the incompetence of the President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul. This is bad news, but hardly surprising news. Afghanistan watchers remember the jaw-dropping increase in opium production reported two years ago in the UNODC’s Afghanistan Opium Survey 2004. That too indicated nation-building in Afghanistan was a bust.
Had a single member of the world press read the ironically entitled “Cannabis: Why We Should Care” section in the middle of the 2006 World Drug Report, they might have scooped their colleagues with the discovery that the report’s authors had inadvertently laid out a convincing case for ending prohibition. After offering a plaintive appeal to treat cannabis cultivation and consumption as serious problems, this section of the report systematically undermines the logic of doing so.
After stipulating that cannabis is a relatively harmless and inexpensive intoxicant, the report presents statistics that the drug is grown and consumed everywhere and in very impressive quantities. Based on public polling data from 134 countries, the report explains that an estimated 4% of humanity enjoys the planet’s most popular illicit drug. There are good reasons to think that figure is an undercount. The authors admit that their estimates of quantities consumed make the 4% figure too low. What is more, given the entirely understandable reluctance of respondents in many societies to answer pollsters' questions about their illicit drug use, the survey's findings are probably too conservative. For example, only 3.5% of the respondents in a 2003 poll in Cambodia and only 1.1% of the respondents in a 2002 poll in Mexico said they used cannabis. Something about those numbers smells funny.
Still, 4% of humanity is 162 million people. To see that in perspective, note that if cannabis users comprised a single nation, it would have the sixth largest national population on the planet.
The highest rates of cannabis use are reported in Oceania. Papua New Guinea tops the list of countries with 29.5% of the population using cannabis, followed closely by Micronesia with 29.1%. The lowest rates are reported in East Asia. Only 0.1% of the Japanese and 0.5% of Taiwanese reportedly indulge.
After Oceania, the next highest rates were reported in North America, followed by West Africa and the Caribbean. Interestingly, the percentage range for the Anglo-Saxon countries is narrow. Canadians and Britons admit to using cannabis at rates of 16.8% and 10.8% respectively, with Australians, New Zealanders and Americans falling in between.
Presentation of cross-national price data and discussions of quality in the text seem to suggest that the authors might have intended to undermine the appeal to take prohibition more seriously. For example, readers learn that the herb is pricey in Japan, at almost $35 per gram, but relatively inexpensive in Kazakhstan, where “as much as 400,000 hectares of cannabis grow wild.” “Swaziland is known for producing high-quality cannabis,” according to the report, while, “Malawi is...world renowned for the quality of its cannabis.”
The authors go on to describe cannabis as an industry that is both enormous in scale and extraordinarily decentralized. The North America market may be worth anywhere from $10 billion to $60 billion annually. That’s a difference equivalent to the gross national incomes of either Nigeria or Ukraine. What’s more, nearly all of this cultivation takes place on small concealed plots so numerous that suppression of cultivation is futile.
Unless you are member of the world press, the answer is obvious. If you are a member of the world press, you’ll have to wait for the press release.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on September 15, 2006.
