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Mr. Sarosi asks excellent questions, the sort which, unfortunately, the US news media never confronts the drug 'control' policy personnel in Washington DC with.<p> If one were to examine the origins of the international treaties regarding drug usage and 'control', one would discover a curious fact: <i>nearly all the impetus for such efforts came from the United States</i>. <a href=http://www.drugwar.com/blackfiends.shtm>And the source of that impetus itself stemmed in large part from two forces: religious fervor and racism.</a><p> The US, with literally missionary zeal, saw itself as being a moral exemplar in a sinful world, and sought to 'clean up' that world through its' efforts such as the temperance movements, which in turn led to drug prohibitions. Non-alcoholic based drugs were the first targets; alcohol came later.<p>The racist aspect was given less attention, save in lurid, apocryphal accounts of non-Whites using drugs such as cocaine and purportedly going on rampages, attacking White women and being so intoxicated that small-caliber firearms were insufficient to kill such a person.<p>That these attempts at drug prohibition were doomed to failure was evident to the intelligentsia, but not to the average citizen, who, then as now, seem woefully dependent upon news media outlets to define reality for them. Hence, misinformation was spread as Gospel...and accorded the same degree of reverence. To speak against such flagrant misinformation, then as now, was seen as seeming to excuse degeneracy.<p>Since it has gone effectively unchallenged, and since it is literally the policy of the US anti-drug organizations to avoid public debate at all costs regarding the efficacy of their policies, the official US anti-drug organizations have enjoyed a degree of insularity from reality as was once enjoyed by Communist commissars. In fact, it is written in the ONDCP's charter that they are to work against any attempts to ameliorate the drug laws, and maintain their severity, <a href=http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1414<i>even to the point of interfering in the democratic process using taxpayer funds to do so, in violation of the US Hatch Act law</i>.</a> <p>This in large part accounts for their attitude towards European dissent regarding their approach to the international 'drug problem'...which, in a very real sense, the US created with its' insistence upon dealing with the problem of drug addiction as a moral failing, not a medical problem.