BOut! HIGH TIMES and the GENERAL

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     Burma : Riots have a way of cheering people up

                      From Seattle to Sydney

HIGH TIMES - Who's Against The Us Drug War? 
-----
Who's Against The Us Drug War? Only The Rest Of The World!
FILED 11/12/99
Photos Courtesy Of Common Sense For Drug Policy/Lennice Wirth

WASHINGTON, DC--Military and civilian "drug czars" from all over the Western
Hemisphere convened here last week for a pep talk from US antidope
generalissimo Barry McCaffrey of the White House, and got quite a bit more
than they'd expected.


 Night of The Drug Generals: Stop the War NOW!

First of all, there was the plainly-worded open letter denouncing Gen.
McCaffrey's scorched-earth policies of hemispheric herbicide warfare and
military subjugation of all Latin America's poor folk in the name of the US
War on Drugs. Hand-delivered to each of the 37 delegates at the Organization
of American States' special drug summit at the plush Omni-Shoreham Hotel,
this elegant communication had to give each of these drug czars something
special to think about. Among its signatories were sundry current and former
Latin American political luminaries who might quite likely wind up running
their respective countries' governments someday, given the stray democratic
election or cabinet reshuffle or bloodless coup.

Then there were the continual noisy political protests right out in front of
the Omni-Shoreham, a vivid reminder that Gen. McCaffrey's iron grip on US
foreign "drug-control" policy over the last three years is a matter of some
controversy, and can actually be challenged right out there in the streets of
the capital of this particular OAS democracy.

Sweet Reason vs. Brass and Braid
Among the open letter's signatories were Oscar Arias and Belisario Betancur,
former presidents of Costa Rica and Colombia respectively, and both still
highly influential in their governments and political parties. Violetta
Chamorro, president of Nicaragua until last year, signed on to the protest
against McCaffrey's hemispheric Drug War, as did Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Adolfo Perez Esquivel. (President Arias also has a Nobel Peace prize, by the
way.) Very notable among the influential US political figures who signed on
to this firmly-worded document of dissent was the former US Ambassador to El
Salvador, the Hon. Robert White. Altogether, the collection of Latin American
brass and braid assembled by McCaffrey for his pep talk were conspicuously
outweighed by the caliber of the civilian opposition to his hemispheric Drug
Warmongering.


 The Generalissimo Burns Up REAL Good!
"As you meet to develop a hemispheric drug strategy," these 37 drug czars
were notified, "it is time to admit that after two decades, the US war on
drugs--both in Latin America and in the United States--is a failure. Despite
a 17-fold increase in US drug-war spending since 1980, record seizures,
arrests, and incarcerations at home, and destruction abroad of hundreds of
drug labs and coca and poppy crops, today in the US illicit drugs are
cheaper, more potent, and more easily available than two decades ago."

The letter wound up with the rather grim warning, "Expanding the US drug war
to other countries will merely further expand the failure of drug control
throughout the hemisphere, while escalating killings and environmental
destruction."

Some Sinister Plot, Or What?
There was less than no problem inducing intelligent international people to
sign on to this document, says its primary organizer, Kevin Zeese of Common
Sense for Drug Policy in Virginia. It was Zeese, largely, who last year got
more than a hundred international luminaries, including Ronald Reagan's
ex-Secretary of State, the Hon. George Schultz , to sign an even stiffer
indictment of McCaffrey's Drug-War policies before a prestigious United
Nations "global drug summit." (This much-ballyhooed UN drug summit just
completely flopped as a direct result, leaving McCaffrey to growl about
sinister "drug legalizers" with uncanny powers of persuasion, to get people
like George Schultz to publicly agree with them, presumably by brainwashing
or blackmail.)

"The objective is to show that the Drug War position is the extreme position,
not the normal one," says Zeese. "Focusing on signatures of former heads of
state, some of the very men and women who signed the huge letter expressing
disgust with the US and UN drug strategies that was delivered to the UN drug
summit last year, and published in the NEW YORK TIMES, this most recent
letter was delivered to everyone in attendance at the OAS summit last week,
and to all their embassies."

Hands Across The Waters
The street demos at the Omni-Shoreham were largely the work of organizers
from several Latin American political watchdog groups and human-rights
outfits. Among the speakers were Cristina Espinel-Roberts of the Colombia
Human Rights Committee, legislative coordinator Lisa Haugaard of the Latin-Ame
rica Working Group, and the Rev. Roger Butts, chaplain of American University
here. For academic input, the Harvard Student Association sent their
president, Marilyn Hoosen, all the way from Massachusetts, and Students for a
Sensible Drug Policy in DC were represented by Kris Lotlikar.

And on November 3, in the First Amendment Lounge of the National Press Club,
the highly influential Criminal Justice Policy Foundation held a formal press
conference to decisively dispel any Drug War propaganda that might still be
lingering in the OAS delegates' ears from Gen. McCaffrey's pep-talk
harangues.

'Do Not Thou Also Do As I Have Done'
There, CJDP president Eric Sterling recalled his long tenure in the 1980s as
a chief counsel to the US House of Representatives Committee on the
Judiciary, where he greatly helped to lay the legislative underpinnings being
exploited now by Gen. McCaffrey in his "zero tolerance" offensives both
globally and domestically. Sterling recalled how in 1983, the whole Judiciary
undertook a much-publicized junket southward, in which he personally
"traveled to five nations in South America accompanying a House Committee
fact-finding mission." It was a historic, highly optimistic, headline-making
junket--and yet since that time, "There has been no net progress in our
international strategy," Sterling observed regretfully.

As a pioneer in the original Ronald Reagan War on Drugs, Sterling heartfully
invited each one of the OAS' delegates at the Shoreham: "Ask yourself how
many generations of your nation will be sacrificed to a failed policy."

At the same rather confessional press conference, the Commissioner of the US S
entencing Commission between 1980 and 1988, Michael Gelacek, spoke of the
Reagan Drug War's triumphs in stiffening mandatory-minimum prison penalties
for International Narcotics Kingpins--which have wound up, under Gen.
McCaffrey's reign, being applied to the likes of neighborhood crack dealers
and California's medical-marijuana political activists. Observing that his
mandatory minimums didn't perceptibly interfere with the importation of
narcotics to the USA even when they were inflicted on their intended targets,
Gelacek rather belatedly concluded, "The time has come for us to adopt a new
strategy on drugs."

Gelacek's shrivening was followed by eloquent addresses from Colletta Younger
of the Washington Office on Latin America and the Rev. Barnard Keels of St.
Mark's Methodist Church. Former El Salvador ambassador White spoke also,
along with Martin Jelsma of the Center for International Policy.

The People In Harm's Way
The most poignant addresses at this press conference, though, were delivered
by two peasant women from Bolivia, Leonida Zurita Vargas and Margarita Teran
of the Coca Growers' Association in Cochabamba there. The US Drug War has
been responsible for a generation now of herbicide spraying and
well-documented military oppression throughout the traditional indigenous
coca-chewing regions of the Andes, and these women spoke very eloquently and
simply to its effects. Meanwhile, Barry McCaffrey's White House aides over in
the Omni-Shoreham (where the OAS proceedings were initially kept secret, for
some reason) may quite characteristically have been introducing braid-laden
Andean police colonels to commercial representatives of huge American
corporations like Monsanto, who export tons of their expensive commercial
herbicides throughout South America every year, thanks to the White House's Of
fice of National Drug Control Policy.

This highly sensitive OAS drug-czar summit may also, rumoredly, have been
haunted by plenty of contract-cutters for US companies which merchandise
napalm and light artillery and super-spook communications technology. In any
case, these happy North American small-arms industrialists are already
feasting in anticipation of the $2 billion dollars which McCaffrey has
pledged to shepherd through Congress this year, straight into the military
budgets of all the big Andean countries, most conspicuously Colombia. There
have been rumors that the White House itself--that is, all the parts not
infested by the ONDCP--have been trying to hold this "antidrug" bonanza down
to a plain old billion or so, at some risk of being smeared as "soft on
drugs" by McCaffrey's personal odd bedfellows in the Republican Congressional
opposition. It was hoped that maybe these street demonstrations against the
OAS drug summit might put a little starch into the President's doublet for
resisting McCaffrey's two-billion-dollar Drug War boondoggle.

It certainly ought to have starched up the bosoms of the estimated 10 million
people in Colombia (total population c. 40 million) who have been marching in
the streets down there over the last couple of weeks, demanding an end NOW to
their everlasting civil war. But since the Colombian military can confidently
expect the lion's share of McCaffrey's $2 billion "drug war" package--and
since US small-arms-manufacturing lobbyists also have a vested interest in
unobstructed arms sales to all three or four sides in that Colombian
conflict, BESIDES the official military--it's not surprising that these
gargantuan Colombian peace demonstrations have attracted little more US media
attention than the OAS drug-czar summit last week, or the political
opposition to it.


Preston Peet - Special to HT News



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