Month: September 2011

Mexico, 13 sep (EFE).-the Latin American Conference of policies on drugs began today in Mexico in order to find alternatives to the current strategy for “moving towards regulating prohibition”, Efe said the organizers.

This is one of the main consensus of people from various organizations involved in the third edition of this Congress which will last until morning. The other, the issue of drugs is treated as a public health problem and not something criminal.

“We must work on a policy against drugs by proposing a regulatory alternative that currently has,” he told Efe Elsa Conde, Member of the collective with an Integral policy towards drugs (Cupihd), one of the associations which organizes this event for the first time in Mexico.

“We must deal with everything that has to do with the market with a different policy to regulate the production, cultivation and consumption,” he said and added that a policy of struggle with violence that “has not solved the problem” has been used in Mexico since 2006.

During these two days, more than 300 American experts, representatives of non-governmental organizations, legislators, politicians and drug exhibited their alternatives and will rely on their experiences.

“Current policies have not worked.” “Globally have focused primarily on trying to cut the supply of illicit drugs with very little attention to demand”, said Coletta Youngers, principal adviser of the Office in Washington for Latin American Affairs (WOLA).

That is why there must be more policies that address the prevention and treatment to people with problems resulting from the drug.

For Youngers, one of the main problems is that anti-drug Latin laws tend to treat all those involved in the chain of drugs by equally.

“A small seller on the street is like a drug dealer and that makes that we filled the prisons of people with minor drug offences,” explained.

Along the same lines uttered María Paula Romo, Member of Ecuadorian, arrived in Mexico to present the case of his country, where, said 40 per cent of prisoners is in prison for small drug offences, data much more appealing if there are women, 80%

“Are not heads of posters, but that they are used to transport small amounts,” he told Efe and pointed out that the case of Ecuador “serves to illustrate what is happening in other places, that while they increase those imprisoned, not reducing the cultivated hectares and there is less traffic and less consumption”.

View of Youngers, another error is that many countries have dedicated to the eradication of crops by force and bring farmers to prison when single reduction policy that has worked is that of the “integral and sustainable development in coca or poppy-producing areas”.

One of the participants who also believes in these policies is Peter sands, Mayor of San José del Guaviare, which with its 65,000 inhabitants is one of the first municipalities of Colombia hectares planted with coca, about 5,000.

“Do not share the programs of our central Government of forced eradication that have led to hundreds of peasants to jail,” said.

“It has been shown that investment in rural development Yes get out of the planting of coca farming families,” added.

At the Conference also involved consumers as Luiz Paulo Guanabara, founder of the Inpud (international network of people who use drugs), to ask to stop is discriminate and marginalize the consumers of substances banned.

“I am a person and I have my rights.” “We want the decriminalization of consumption and the decriminalization of the user,” he noted. EFE