HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/germany.marijuana

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Here is the _Time_ article on marijuana in Germany from March 16, 1992.

Germany: The Right to Get High

Germany found itself mired in the increasingly heated European debate
over drug legalization last week when an appellate judge in Lubeck
declared the country's laws against marijuana and hashish unconstitutional.
In a ruling that must now be tested in the nation's highest court, Judge
Wolfgang Neskovic overturned the conviction of a woman who had been
caught hiding 1.2 grams of hashish in her sock.

The surprise decision seems destined to further distance the ruling
Christian Democrats, who seek stricted enforcement of antidrug laws, from
the opposition Social Democrats, who appear inclined to support drug
legalization proposals that would make Germany more like the Netherlands,
where 2000 coffeehouses openly sell marijuana and hashish. Ruled Neskovic:
"Intoxication, like eating, drinking, and sex, is one of the fundamentals
of mankind." The judge himself confessed to preferring seltez water to
cannabis.

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                  Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
                               The New York Times

                  March  3, 1992, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 5; Column 1; Foreign Desk

LENGTH: 559 words

HEADLINE: A Pro-Drug Ruling Stirs the Pot in  Germany

BYLINE: By STEPHEN KINZER, Special to The New York Times

DATELINE: BONN, March 2

 BODY:
   A German judge has set off a national debate by ruling that laws against
possession of  marijuana  and hashish are unconstitutional.

   Leaders of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's governing coalition have condemned the
decision, but many senior opposition figures have endorsed it. A final ruling
from  Germany's  highest court is expected later in the year.

    The decision was handed down last week by Wolfgang Nescovic, an
appeals-court judge in Lubeck. The case concerned a woman who had been
sentenced to two months in prison for possession of 1.12 grams of hashish
-- about one-twenty-fifth of an ounce.

   In his decision, Judge Nescovic appraised the dangers of alcohol, and ruled
that keeping alcohol  legal  while banning hashish and  marijuana  violated a
constitutional provision guaranteeing all citizens equality before the law. He
also said it violated a provision guaranteeing personal freedoms that do not
infringe on the rights of others.

   "The physical effects of  cannabis  use are relatively limited," Judge
Nescovic wrote. He cited a German medical study that concluded that smoking one
or two joints of  marijuana  a day is harmless, "or at a minumum, less
dangerous than the daily consumption of alcohol or 20 cigarettes."

   Conservative politicians criticized the ruling. A Christian Democratic
legislator, Rolf Olderog, accused Judge Nescovic of using his post to pursue a
"left-socialist political agenda." Roland Sauer, spokesman on drug issues for
Mr. Kohl's party, remarked: "Government involvement in distributing drugs means,
in essence, that the state becomes a dealer.  Germany  would become a mecca
for drug users."

   But an unexpected number of elected officials welcomed the decision. The
Justice Minister in the state of Lower Saxony, Heidi Alm-Merk, said she had
used hashish herself.

   A leading Social Democratic member of Parliament, Gudrun Schaich-Walch,
advocated a drug policy like that in the Netherlands, where more than 2,000
Dutch coffee shops offer  marijuana  and hashish for sale. The trade is
regulated by the Government, and about half the  marijuana  sold is grown in
local greenhouses.

   Support for Judge Nescovic's decision has come from many states, where
responsibility lies for most police and judicial functions.

   "It is high time to take  cannabis  products out of the zone of illegality,"
said Christiane Krajewski, Health Minister of Saarland. The state's Interior
Minister, Friedel Lapple, told a radio interviewer, "I would look positively on
any policy that decriminalizes the use of soft drugs."

   The Social Welfare Minister of Lower Saxony, Walter Hiller, said it was "a
dumb argument" to say that hashish or  marijuana  use normally leads to the use
of more dangerous drugs. He said that if the substances remained illegal, they
should be "unofficially tolerated."

   Newspapers and magazines have recently expressed support for  legalization.
The news magazine Der Spiegel wrote, "Hashish users do not harm themselves or
others so seriously that they must be restricted by law."

   Even if the German high court rules that current drug laws are
constitutional, the political debate over  legalization  is likely to go on.
Officials in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia said last weekend that they
would submit a bill in the German Parliament to  legalize  possession of small
amounts of hashish and  marijuana.

===========

So, that makes: Alaska, Germany, Amsterdam, and part of
Australia(?), right?

============
RoN
[e-mail]

=============================================================================

Here is an article from _The New Federalist_, a newspaper run by supporters
of Lyndon LaRouche. I'll let you folks weigh the arguments presented within.

-- Chris

----------------------------------------------------------

"Gutless German Politicians Bow to Dope Lobby"

by Frank Muechler from _The New Federalist_ April 27, 1992

WIESBADEN, March 25 (EIRNS) -- Drug mafia pressure on Europe is rapidly
increasing.  The North American drugs market is saturated, and
organized crime has therefore been seeking to explot the European
market and to expand into Eastern Europe.

And how are our politicians reacting? They are raising the white flag
of surrender! Never having begun a serious effort for an effective
fight against the drug mafia, they are announcing, loudly and often,
that the battle has already been lost and now only damage control can
be aimed at; that is, decriminalization of drug addiction.

Behind this sanctimonious campaign for the "decriminaliztion of drug
addiction" is nothing but the campaign that has been directly conducted
by the drug mafia since 1968 for the legalization of drugs of all sorts.

The first step in that campaign was the formation of a British
parlimentary committee, the so-called Wootton Committee, which advocated
decriminalizating marijuana possession.

The chairman of this committee, Lady Wootton, vice speaker of the House
of Lords and student of H. G. Wells, was once on the board of the
Legalize Cannabis Campaign in England.  The Wootton Committee also
participated in the buildup of the National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws (NORML) in the United States.  In the 1970's, the
International Cannabis Alliance for Reform was formed, and held its
first conference in December 1979 in Amsterdam to launch a worldwide
coordinated campaign for the "decrim" of marijuana and its derivatives,
such as hashish. It went so far as to claim that the prohibition of
cannabis purchase and use violates human rights and must therefore be
abolished. Cannabis, it was claimed, should be excluded from the United
Nations Drug Convention of 1961.

The success of this campugn was not long in coming. At the beginning
of the 1980's, the demand for the decriminalization of marijuana echoed
throughout the European liberal press, accompanied by the drug lobby's
convenient lie that alcohol, coffee, and tobacco are as much harmful drugs
as hashish, heroin, and cocaine.  Since no one wanted to blurt out the
whole truth by demanding the legalization of ALL drugs, the initial goal
was the "compromise" that politicians and citizens were to agree to
vis-a-vis this media pressure -- the decontrol of marijuana.

This led, at least in some countries (Holland, for example), to tolerating
consumption of marijuana, and no longer prosecuting it; or to creation
of "free areas" in which drug abuse could be practiced openly (for example,
in the Christiania area in Copenhagen and, until recently, at the Platzspitz
in Zurich). Today, we are seeing a new wave of propaganda from the drug
cartel in Europe.

PROPAGANDA FOR THE DOPE CARTEL

o  Meinike Salish, a European parliament deputy from the German Social
Democratic Party (SPD) and a member of the socialist faction in Strassburg,
demanded "a broad replacement program, whether with methadone or other
replacement substances. The possession for personal consumption should
no longer be punishable under the law; those sick from drugs should be
decriminalized."

o  Klaus Baumgartner, health care director of the Swiss city of Bern, asked
for the decontrol of drugs since nothing could be gained by prohibition.

o  The Swiss supreme court, the Bundesgericht in Lausanne, determined,
contrary to all existing medical evidence, that it cannot be asserted that
cannabis "is not suitable to be dangerous to the psychelogical or physical
health of many human beings."

o  The Bielefeld chief of police, Horst Kurse, called for decriminalization
of the consumption of drugs and for state-controlled distribution of certain
drugs.  "Otherwise, htings will get even worse."  State-controlled
distribution of methadone, hashish, and heroin, he said, is an "effective
instrument" for controlling the immense crimes of procurement and the
harmful effect on the health of those who consume drugs.

o  In Luebeck, Germany, Wolfgang Nescovic, presiding judge in the state
court, arrived at the judgement that hashish and marijuana must not be
forbidden if alcohol and nicotine are allowed.  With this justification,
the judge dismissed a case against a woman who had smuggled hasish into
her husband's prison cell. The German constitutional court will now
decide whether the prohibition of hashish violates Germany's fundamental
constitutional law.

The list goes on, and the impact of this drug policy on society is
increasing. This. the Interior Minister of the German state of North
Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Schnoor, asserted in the context of publication
of crime statistics for 1991 that it is neccessary to break out of
traditional structures and reorient society to see a junkie first as a
sick human being and only second as a criminal.  Whoever thinks that Schnoor
might therefore advocate a massive contruction of therapy centers should
think again.  Instead, he htinks that drug addicts must be decriminalized
so that possession of illegal drugs for use in a small circle of friends
is stricken from the list of criminal offenses. Of course, this will not
help the drugs addicts, but it will give Schnoor must more attractive
criminal statistics. Naturally, the Interior Minister did not mention that.

One thing is striking about all these statements: the political and
economic dimensions of the drugs trade are completely left out of them.
An effective war against the drug mafia is no longer discussed.  Politicians
are not ready to take even the smallest step, if we recall how long a law
against laundering of drug money has been discussed in Germany without
ever coming to a decision.

Another word on the forseeable consequences of this policy of decontrol of
drugs: there has been much experience with such a policy. In the 1960's and
1970's, a program was instituted in Great Britain under which heroin was
given to addicts. Until 1970, heroin was prescribed by doctors, which led to
a doubling of the number of addicts between 1970 and 1980.  Simultaneously
with this government program, the drug mafia flooded the market with
cheap heroin more potent than that given out by the state. In only five
years, there was another doubling of the number of addicts!

How did legalization affect crime statistics? According to a study done
in 1978, 50% of those addicts who were treated in the program were convicted
of a crime in the first year of their participation. Eighty-four percent
of the addicts registered by the government continued to take other
drugs. The program ended in utter failure.

Schnoor says he realizes that, by advocating liberalization of drug policy,
he will make himself "unpopular with just about everybody." The Anti-Drug
Coalition in Germany, which was founded by associates of Lyndon LaRouche
and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, says it will make sure that is the case -- and
especially with his constituents, since a government official who gives
up the fight against the drug mafia before he has even begun, especially
in the state where 25% of all German drug deaths occur, is simply in the
wrong job.  Only cowardly politicians can become such shameless spokesmen
for the drug lobby.

[Picture of a bunch of people under a sign reading "Fur eine internationale
Anti-Drogen-Koalition". Caption: "A meeting of the Anti-Drug Coalition in
Frankfurt, Germany in 1979. LaRouche's co-thinkers in the Coalition have
led the battle in Germany against legalizing drugs; and the Social
Democrats are leading the battle FOR legalization."]