CNN: Ecstasy successfully used to treat PTSD

Dr. Michael Mithoefer is at the forefront of a controversial field of study. He is leading a pilot study into using MDMA — the pure form of the illegal drug ecstasy — to treat depression and post traumatic stress disorder. Read more

Prescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More Americans than Illegal Drugs

A report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission has concluded that prescription drugs have outstripped illegal drugs as a cause of death.

An analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law enforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug abuse problem.

“The abuse has reached epidemic proportions,” said Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. “It’s just explosive.” Read more

Massachusetts voters decriminalize marijuana

Massachusetts voters have approved Question 2, which eliminated criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of cannabis.

The new law, which will take effect in 30 days, calls for a $100 fine and confiscation of the substance for those caught with an ounce or less with no reporting against a person’s criminal record. Those under 18 caught with cannabis will pay a larger fine, up to $1,000, and participate in a drug awareness program and perform community service.

Governor Patrick, the attorney general and district attorneys across the state were among opponents of the initiative, saying that decriminalization would promote drug use, cause a rise in violence and workplace safety hazards, and increase the number of car accidents and youths driving under the influence.

“The people were ahead of the politicians on this issue,” said Whitney Taylor, chairwoman of the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy. “They want to focus our limited law enforcement resources on serious and violent crimes. They recognize under the new law that the punishment will fit the offense.”

Raw Story | Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Incentivizing Murder: Plan Colombia and the Bitter Fruits of Empire

The War on Drugs meets the War on Terror, and the result, inevitably, is stone-cold murder: Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents (NYT): Read more

Report: Netherlands cannabis growers yearly net $2.7b

THE HAGUE (AFP) - Clandestine cannabis growers in the Netherlands net two billion euros (2.7 billion dollars) a year — worth almost half the country’s horticultural sector — a Dutch newspaper reported on Saturday. Read more

Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghan Heroin Trade

WASHINGTON - When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 110 pounds of heroin. Soon after the seizure, United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai, according to a participant in the briefing.

The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.

Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, now the chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council, the governing body for the region that includes Afghanistan’s second largest city, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks by longtime foes.

“I am not a drug dealer, I never was and I never will be,” the president’s brother said in a recent phone interview. “I am a victim of vicious politics.”

But the assertions about him have deeply worried top American officials in Kabul and in Washington. The United States officials fear that perceptions that the Afghan president might be protecting his brother are damaging his credibility and undermining efforts by the United States to buttress his government, which has been under siege from rivals and a Taliban insurgency fueled by drug money, several senior Bush administration officials said. Their concerns have intensified as American troops have been deployed to the country in growing numbers.

“What appears to be a fairly common Afghan public perception of corruption inside their government is a tremendously corrosive element working against establishing long-term confidence in that government - a very serious matter,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, who was commander of coalition military forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and is now retired. “That could be problematic strategically for the United States.”

The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in interviews last week.

Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according to current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. In meetings with President Karzai, including a 2006 session with the United States ambassador, the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief and their British counterparts, American officials have talked about the allegations in hopes that the president might move his brother out of the country, said several people who took part in or were briefed on the talks.

“We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there,” one official said. But President Karzai has resisted, demanding clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, several officials said. “We don’t have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment,” a White House official said. “That allows Karzai to say, ‘where’s your proof?’ ”

Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the president’s brother.

Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White House officials dispute that, instead citing limited D.E.A. resources in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the reasons for the lack of an inquiry.

“We invested considerable resources into building Afghan capability to conduct such investigations and consistently encouraged Karzai to take on the big fish and address widespread Afghan suspicions about the link between his brother and narcotics,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, who was the coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq at the National Security Council until last year.

It was not clear whether President Bush had been briefed on the matter.Humayun Hamidzada, press secretary for President Karzai, denied that the president’s brother was involved in drug trafficking or that the president had intervened to help him. “People have made allegations without proof,” Mr. Hamidzada said.

Spokesmen for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An Informant’s Tip

The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan investigators to the drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006.

The informant, Hajji Aman Kheri, was arrested a year later on charges of plotting to kill an Afghan vice president in 2002. The Afghan Supreme Court recently ordered him freed for lack of evidence, but he has not been released. Nearly 100 political leaders in his home region protested his continued incarceration last month.

Mr. Kheri, in a phone interview from jail in Kabul, said he had been an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States intelligence agencies, an assertion confirmed by American counternarcotics and intelligence officials. Several of those officials, frustrated that the Bush administration was not pressing for Mr. Kheri’s release, came forward to disclose his role in the drug seizure.

Ever since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, critics have charged that the Bush administration has failed to take aggressive action against the Afghan narcotics trade, because of both opposition from the Karzai government and reluctance by the United States military to get bogged down by eradication and interdiction efforts that would antagonize local warlords and Afghan poppy farmers. Now, Afghanistan provides about 95 percent of the world’s supply of heroin.

Just as the Taliban have benefited from money produced by the drug trade, so have many officials in the Karzai government, according to American and Afghan officials. Thomas Schweich, a former senior State Department counternarcotics official, wrote in The New York Times Magazine in July that drug traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. “Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government,” he said.

Suspicions of Corruption

Of the suspicions about Ahmed Wali Karzai, Representative Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has focused on the Afghan drug problem in Congress, said, “I would ask people in the Bush administration and the D.E.A. about him, and they would say, ‘We think he’s dirty.’ ”

In the two drug seizures in 2004 and 2006, millions of dollars’ worth of heroin was found. In April 2006, Mr. Jan, by then a member of the Afghan Parliament, met with American investigators at a D.E.A. safe house in Kabul and was asked to describe the events surrounding the 2004 drug discovery, according to notes from the debriefing session. He told the Americans that after impounding the truck, he received calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai and Shaida Mohammad, an aide to President Karzai, according to the notes.

Mr. Jan later became a political opponent of President Karzai, and in a 2007 speech in Parliament he accused Ahmed Wali Karzai of involvement in the drug trade. Mr. Jan was shot to death in July as he drove from a guesthouse to his main residence in Kandahar Province. The Taliban were suspected in the assassination.

Mr. Mohammad, in a recent interview in Washington, dismissed Mr. Jan’s account, saying that Mr. Jan had fabricated the story about being pressured to release the drug shipment in order to damage President Karzai.

But Khan Mohammad, the former Afghan commander in Kandahar who was Mr. Jan’s superior in 2004, said in a recent interview that Mr. Jan reported at the time that he had received a call from the Karzai aide ordering him to release the drug cache. Khan Mohammad recalled that Mr. Jan believed that the call had been instigated by Ahmed Wali Karzai, not the president.

“This was a very heavy issue,” Mr. Mohammad said.

He provided the same account in an October 2004 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Mohammad said that after a subordinate captured a large shipment of heroin about two months earlier, the official received repeated telephone calls from Ahmed Wali Karzai. “He was saying, ‘This heroin belongs to me, you should release it,’ ” the newspaper quoted Mr. Mohammad as saying.

Languishing in Detention

In 2006, Mr. Kheri, the Afghan informant, tipped off American counternarcotics agents to another drug shipment. Mr. Kheri, who had proved so valuable to the United States that his family had been resettled in Virginia in 2004, briefly returned to Afghanistan in 2006.

The heroin in the truck that was seized was to be delivered to Ahmed Wali Karzai’s bodyguard in the village of Maidan Shahr, and then transported to Kandahar, one of the Afghans involved in the deal later told American investigators, according to notes of his debriefing. Several Afghans - the drivers and the truck’s owner - were arrested by Afghan authorities, but no action was taken against Mr. Karzai or his bodyguard, who investigators believe serves as a middleman, the American officials said.

In 2007, Mr. Kheri visited Afghanistan again, once again serving as an American informant, the officials said. This time, however, he was arrested by the Karzai government and charged in the 2002 assassination of Hajji Abdul Qadir, an Afghan vice president, who had been a political rival of Mr. Kheri’s brother, Hajji Zaman, a former militia commander and a powerful figure in eastern Afghanistan.

Mr. Kheri, in the phone interview from Kabul, denied any involvement in the killing and said his arrest was politically motivated. He maintained that the president’s brother was involved in the heroin trade.

“It’s no secret about Wali Karzai and drugs,” said Mr. Kheri, who speaks English. “A lot of people in the Afghan government are involved in drug trafficking.”

Mr. Kheri’s continued detention, despite the Afghan court’s order to release him, has frustrated some of the American investigators who worked with him.

In recent months, they have met with officials at the State Department and the office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking to persuade the Bush administration to intervene with the Karzai government to release Mr. Kheri.

“We have just left a really valuable informant sitting in jail to rot,” one investigator said.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

NYT | JAMES RISEN | Sunday, October 5, 2008

Cannabis less harmful than drinking, smoking: report

Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, according to a report by a research charity Thursday, which called for a “serious rethink” of drug policy.

The Beckley Foundation, a charity which numbers senior experts and other academics among its advisors, said banning cannabis has no impact on supply and turns users into criminals.

“Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco,” says the report by the Foundation’s Global Cannabis Commission.

The government is pressing for cannabis to be re-classified in law as a Class B drug compared with its current, less serious, Class C classification.

Authorities are concerned notably by the growing prevalence of the potent “skunk” form of the drug. Around 80 percent of cannabis seizures are of this strain, said to be linked to mental health problems, official figures show.

The Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust, claimed only two deaths worldwide have been attributed to cannabis, while alcohol and tobacco use together kill an estimated 150,000 people in Britain alone.

“Many of the harms associated with cannabis use are the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment,” it said.

“It is only through a regulated market that we can better protect young people from the ever more potent forms of dope,” it added.

The decision to reclassify cannabis upwards into the more punitive Class B category — which includes amphetamines — is a U-turn for the Labour government.

Cannabis was downgraded from Class B when Tony Blair was prime minister, but Gordon Brown announced a review of its status soon after taking over in June last year.

An earlier review of the cannabis classification, at the time of the last 2005 general election, resulted in it remaining Class C.

AFP | Thursday, October 2, 2008

US moves to suspend trade benefits for Bolivia

WASHINGTON, Sept 26 (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush is moving to suspend longtime U.S. trade benefits for Bolivia because of that country’s failure to cooperate in drug-fighting efforts in the past year, the top U.S. trade official said on Friday.

The move reflects the increasingly strained relations between the United States and Bolivia under the leadership of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

“The Morales administration’s recent actions related to narcotics cooperation are not those of a partner and are not consistent with the rules of these programs,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in a statement.

“We regret that the proposed suspension that is prompted by the Bolivian government’s action could affect hard-working Bolivians,” Schwab said. “Once imposed, the suspension could be lifted as soon as the Bolivian government improves its performance.”

In La Paz, Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca criticized the decision as “revenge” for Morales’ expulsion earlier this month of the U.S. ambassador, accused by the leftist leader of fomenting violent protests.

“We consider this plan by President (George W.) Bush as yet another aggression against Bolivian democracy,” Choquehuanca told reporters.

He said while Bolivia would like to see trade benefits with the United States extended, the country would strive to strengthen economic ties with Iran, Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, India and China.

Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia have received duty-free status for most of their goods under a program dating to 1991 to help fight the illegal drug trade.

Last year, U.S. imports from Bolivia totaled $362.6 million, far smaller than from other Andean countries. That included $73 million worth of jewelry and about $20 million of clothing and household textile goods, as well as $64 million of tin, $46 million of crude oil and $20 million of fuel oil.

The law governing the program requires the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to hold a hearing on the proposed suspension before it takes effect. That hearing has not yet been scheduled, Schwab’s office said.

COCA DISPUTE

Bolivia’s recent expulsion of U.S. Agency for International Development personnel and removal of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials from the country’s main illegal coca production areas were two reasons behind the proposed suspension of benefits, U.S. trade officials said.

“A marked increase in cocaine production, the government’s failure to close illegal coca markets, and publicly stated policies that increase government-sanctioned coca cultivation, have placed in doubt the Bolivian government’s commitment to cooperate in the fight against drug trafficking,” the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said.

Choquehuanca denied the claims and said coca cultivation in Bolivia had increased only by 5 percent.

The decision came one day after five leading U.S. business groups urged the Bush administration and Congress to consider ending trade benefits for both Bolivia and Ecuador because of what they described as inadequate protections for foreign investors in both countries.

The Andean trade preference program will expire at the end of the year unless Congress renews it. The Bush administration has pushed Congress to extend benefits for Colombia and Peru, while mulling what to do about Bolivia and Ecuador.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said the Bush administration had not yet decided whether to propose suspending Ecuador from the program.

Ecuador’s ambassador to Washington, Luis Gallegos, said on Friday he was surprised by the business group’s letter

“Ecuador is the only country in the Andean region with zero coca cultivation. The purpose of (the trade benefit program) is to combat drugs and there is no better success story in the region than Ecuador in this regard,” Gallegos said. (Additional reporting by Eduardo Garcia in La Paz; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Reuters | Doug Palmer | Friday, September 26, 2008

From Marijuana to Ecstasy, Scientists Fight to Study Illicit Drugs’ Medical Properties

The patients at Dr. Michael Mithoefer’s clinic in South Carolina all suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some are the victims of rape and child sexual abuse, others — veterans returning home from Iraq — bear the psychic scars of war.

They have tried other therapies before but here, under the watchful eye of Mithoefer and his staff, they’re trying something new — MDMA, better known as ecstasy, a drug that if bought on a street corner would land these patients in jail.

The results of the Mithoefer study — the first Food and Drug Administration-approved Phase 2 trial of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress — will not be known until it concludes later this month. But the treatment already shows promise, the doctor says.

“We have had some very dramatic results,” Mithoefer said. “We have examples of people on disability for years who have now returned to work. The treatment has had a profound effect on a number of people whose symptoms are now much better. It hasn’t been that way for everybody but, overall, this seems to be much more effective than what is currently out there.”

Like an ex-con trying to clean up his act and leave behind his criminal past, illicit drugs have a hard time shaking off their bad reputations. Many illegal drugs such as MDMA and marijuana could have pharmacological futures. Others such morphine and cocaine were initially developed for medicinal purposes, and some can be found in your medicine cabinet masquerading under assumed names. But scientists looking to do new research say it is difficult to get funding or approval for studies on drugs with rap sheets.

That marijuana, cocaine, morphine, methamphetamines, even the so-called “date rape drug” GHB, have versions approved by the FDA does not mean securing funds and permission to research these drugs is easy.

“The DEA really slowed us down,” Mithoefer said of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “We submitted a 550-page application to the FDA and we were approved pretty quickly.”

“Working with a controversial Schedule 1 drug made getting permission from the DEA difficult,” he said of the class of substances the DEA believes has the greatest potential for abuse.

Many of the scientists working on research with illegal drugs say the government bureaucracy and the need to obtain permission from numerous agencies scares off researchers, their backers and institutions.

“The university [the University of South Carolina] didn’t want to be involved in the study,” Mithoefer said. “It seemed too controversial. Fortunately, we were getting our funding elsewhere. The lengthy delays makes it difficult for many researchers to go forward. This is a real problem. There are many people suffering and there shouldn’t be these needless delays.”

Those delays, say the FDA and DEA, are necessary to ensuring the most dangerous drugs do not get into the wrong hands or are misused.

Research proposals for human trials need to be approved by the FDA and DEA and, in some cases, as when marijuana is involved, other federal agencies as well.

“There are a lot of players when it comes to drugs,” DEA spokeswoman Rogene Waite said. “Different agencies with different authorities each need to sign off.”

“From our perspective, we’re always concerned about safety and, regardless of the schedule, we’re looking at the same set of issues. But when it comes to illegal drugs, there is going to be the highest levels of security and scrutiny on those drugs,” she said.

The MDMA study, which involved 21 patients and began four years ago, took years of planning. Although Mithoefer is affiliated with the University of South Carolina, the study was conducted at his private clinic and funded by a nonprofit group. After the DEA stalled approval for the research, he says, the university balked from sponsoring a study involving a controversial and otherwise illegal substance.

But MDMA is not the only drug that has spent time both on the street and in the laboratory.

MDMA, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine, has its roots in the medical community. It was developed and used surreptitiously by psychiatrists in the 1970s. If it was one day to return to the medicine chest, it would follow a long line of other drugs that remain illegal in one form but legal in another.

“If you look back over the history of many so-called ’street drugs,’ many have origins in well-intentioned and scientifically sound theories for use in medicine and more noble purposes than just getting high,” said Paul L. Doering, a pharmacology professor and director of the University of Florida’s Drug Information and Pharmacy Resource Center.

“The distinction between illegal and legal is tenuous,” he said. “The door swings in both directions. These drugs have to replace their tie-dye shirts with lab coats.”

Though marijuana cigarettes are sold for medicinal purposes in some states, the drug remains technically illegal in federal law in all but one form.

Sold under the name Marinol, THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) is prescribed as an appetite stimulant to treat nausea in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy and weight loss in AIDS patients.

The popular and legal drug Adderall, which is given to children with attention-deficit disorder, is just one carbon molecule away from being the popular illegal drug methamphetamine.

Cocaine, a local anesthetic like Novocain, has the added benefit of restricting blood vessels to stop bleeding. It is regularly used in its liquid form in emergency rooms and in facial surgery.

The “date-rape” drug GHB is classified as a Schedule 1 drug and is illegal if possessed with the intention of drugging someone in a bar, but is classified as a Schedule 2 drug when prescribed as Xyrem for use in the treatment of narcolepsy.

Beyond just governmental bureaucracy, Doering and others say, other barriers remain in the way of conducting medical research on illegal drugs.

“There are several factors keeping these drugs out of the lab,” he said. “The main challenge is overcoming their bad reputations and convincing the research community that under the right circumstances — under evaluation and regulation — these drugs can be tamed to help humankind.”

In addition to government regulation and the drugs’ bad reputations, an inability to patent and, therefore, make money off these substances also stall research.

Raw marijuana, literally a weed, cannot be patented and neither can a drug discovered decades ago like LSD.

Salvia divinorum, a hallucinogenic, is perhaps the newest plant to be recognized for both its recreational and potential medical uses.

Still legal in most states, the drug is under review by the DEA to determine whether it should be criminalized.

If it is declared illegal before scientists get a chance to begin research, some fear that the drug will face the same challenges of other illegal substances with medicinal potential.

“Salvia might have all kinds of uses in the treatment of mental disorders and we shouldn’t stop research before we’ve even started,” said Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit that funds research on otherwise illegal drugs, including Mithoefer’s MDMA study.

“It is hard to quantify the lost benefits by not allowing this research to go on,” Doblin said. “But how can the government justify keeping drugs that improve or save people’s lives out of their hands?”

ABC News | RUSSELL GOLDMAN | Thursday, September 11, 2008

Video | The Mena Connection

Why Bush Sr. and Clinton are such great friends

In 1992, an obscure governor from an economically backward state became president of the United States.

How did Clinton ever become a candidate let alone make it into the White House?

To be sure, he was intelligent, charismatic, and had a well organized campaign.

He promised “change” from the disastrous fours year of the Bush Sr. administration.

In fact, he and George Bush Sr. were friends and colleagues long before they ran against each other, a fact obscured by the media.

As president, Clinton:

1. Discontinued investigations into Bush’s role in “Iran Contra”
2. Continued Bush’s savage attacks on Iraqi civilians via attacks on that country’s infrastructure
3. Continued to allow hard drugs to flow into the country unimpeded while drastically ramping up persecution and prosecution of marijuana users
4. Witnessed a dramatic act of domestic terrorism (Oklahoma City) which he saw no need to investigate,
5. Greatly accelerated the erosion of civil liberties in the US
6. Continued the precedent of attacking countries that had not attacked or even threatened us (Yugoslavia)
7. Presided over a vicious military-style attack on US civilians (Waco)

Brasscheck TV | Monday, September 8, 2008

Mena Coverup

Bill Clinton and the Mena Arkansas cocaine smuggling operations.

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