Conference urges drug use education

Sean Luce helps patients in Berkeley, Calif., get medical marijuana. Narelle Ellington wants heroin addicts to have access to clean needles. Maria Mercedes Moreno works to secure human rights for coca growers.

Advocacy groups from around the world and across the political spectrum converged in Albuquerque for the International Drug Policy Reform Conference at the Albuquerque Convention Center last week. These groups included Luce’s Berkeley Patients Group, Ellington’s Harm Reduction Coalition and Moreno’s Mama Coca, as well as the UNM Health Sciences Center’s Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes and dozens more.

Jennifer Burbank, clinic director of Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse, said her group would like to teach young people about the effects of different drugs and about safe practices if they decide to take drugs.

“Our goals are to provide current, scientific drug education so that people can make informed decisions about whether they’re going to use a drug, and if so, how would be the safest way to use it,” she said.

Jorge G. Castañeda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, said the U.S. drug war needs to be reformed in the way it deals with Central and South America. He said it doesn’t make sense to make it illegal to bring marijuana from Mexico to the U.S. but to then allow marijuana to be sold in California. He said the drug prohibition contributes to violence in Mexico and Latin America.

“It’s very difficult to understand exactly what the Americans want,” Castañeda said. “Either they want us to kill people in Tijuana (or) they want us to go (shopping) in Los Angeles. The two make sense, but both of them together do not make a lot of sense. This is the first issue that we really have to face in U.S. — Latin America drug policy: What does the United States want?”

Castañeda said the Obama administration hasn’t made much progress in reforming the drug war policies.

“There is no good reason why the Obama administration should buy into previous, failed U.S. drug policies in Latin America,” he said. “(The Drug War is) going to be lost, and the best thing to do with a war that is going to be lost is to stay away from it.”

Daniel Wolfe, of the International Harm Reduction Development Program, talked about prison camps in China and Russia where drug users are forced to do hard labor for possessing small amounts of drugs. He said Brazil’s progressive drug program is a better alternative because drug addiction is treated as a disease instead of a crime.

Moreno said Mama Coca advocates for workers-rights protection for growers of coca, Columbia’s primary crop and a primary ingredient in cocaine. She said the Colombian government sprays pesticides on coca fields, causing serious health problems for the people working there.

Moreno said eradicating coca altogether is an unrealistic goal.

“Coca’s a traditional crop for the Indians,” she said. “It’s a holy plant.”