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01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31
Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason
Ref. : Letters to the editor
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries
02.03 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients
01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients
02.04 Err-America
02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired'
Ref. : The Daily Howler
01.25 Thinking About Fictions
01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road
01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy
01.22 Security Fools
02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs
02.09 Growing Hunger in America
02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being
02.08 Thinking About Oracles
02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle
02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union
02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism?
02.04 The New War Against Money
02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers
02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts
02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite
02.01 Thinking About Definitives
02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)
01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo
01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual
01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship
01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power
01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform
01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding”
01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand
01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid
01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth
01.21 How Obama Lost His Way
01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts
01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements
01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors
01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors
01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power
01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare
02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist
02.06 The Free Market Fetish
02.04 The Crisis is Not Over
02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block
02.02 Rule by the Rich
01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs
01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True
01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation
01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It
01.18 Thinking About Accelerants
02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic
02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes
02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine
02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti
01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry"
01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning
01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered
01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders
01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs
01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover
01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti
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.
