UK’s Mike Trace – Drugs Fifth Columnist (BRAHA)

UK’s Mike Trace – Drugs Fifth Columnist

Posted By BRAHA Editor On October 6, 2008 @ 4:53 pm In Drug Prevention Comments Disabled

Feb 2009 Update to this story: The resurrection of a six year old  article in the “European Cities Against Drugs” newsletter has been  misrepresented as current news. Here is the original story published February 2003  ECAD Newsletter, “Drug Scandal in UN and EU.”. It is extremely inappropriate journalism. /Blair

(the prohibitionists are mobilising… here is a classic example of engineering the dialog – especially this bit : “The conspiracy against the UN Conventions on Drugs shows very clearly how money and contacts, getting the ‘right’ people on key posts can overrule democracy and the will of the voters. It shows how elected politicians are viewed as chessmen that can be moved in any direction. Furthermore, the fact that powerful, financial foundations can influence politics in almost any direction should be a matter for great concern.” /Blair )

According to information obtained by HNN, former UK deputy drug czar Mike Trace, is masterminding a European legalisation campaign at the same time as he has been appointed Head of Demand Reduction at the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime in Vienna, UNDCP . Several documents containing letters, minutes from secret meetings, secret plans, references to meetings and phone calls clearly show that the campaign was planned to take place before the mid-term review of the outcome of the 1998 UNGASS meeting in New York and in connection with the conference in Vienna in April this year, i.e. the work of the agency* is by no means terminated.

For about a year Mike Trace has worked as a ‘fifth columnist’ as he puts it himself in a letter – “A fifth column role would allow me to oversee the setting-up of the agency while promoting its aims subtly in formal government settings.” Last month he warned a colleague in the ‘agency’, “A small but crucial point – can I from now on not be referred to by name in any written material.”

Image via WikipediaA well-known UK organisation, Release International, has served as ‘cover’. A secret steering group was founded, money was raised from the Soros-funded Open Society Institute, contacts were established and the real work of the ‘agency’ could begin in Spring 2002. The project was called ‘Project X’ and ‘London Initiative’. Even if it was started in the UK the aim from the beginning was to go global.

The following people are members of the agency´s steering group:

• Mike Trace, chair and project leader from the beginning till December 2002;
• Rowena Young, former executive director RAPT, UK;
• Dame Ruth Runciman, UK;
• John Grieve, formerly Metropolitan Police, UK;
• Rudi Fortson;
• Alison Downie, Chair of Trustees Release;
• Charles Lloyd, Research Director Rowntree Foundation, UK;
• Mable Wisse-Smith, Director, Open Society, Brussels, Belgium;
• Cheryl Kernot, the ‘agency´s’ project leader from Dec 2002; Kernot is a former Australian politician. She has now moved to London.

The conspiracy against the UN Conventions on Drugs shows very clearly how money and contacts, getting the ‘right’ people on key posts can overrule democracy and the will of the voters. It shows how elected politicians are viewed as chessmen that can be moved in any direction. Furthermore, the fact that powerful, financial foundations can influence politics in almost any direction should be a matter for great concern.

This is just the beginning of the story about the ‘agency’s’ work. Documents show strategies, correspondence and a large number of people outside the steering group that has been contacted or that are presently involved. The story is developing.

The UK paper Daily Mail runs a story about Mike Trace as the ‘Drugs Fifth Columnist’ today. In an editorial comment the Daily Mails states, “What a wonderful comment on Britain´s gloriously confused guidance on the evils of drugs. The man who helped to shape it as deputy drug czar, and who is now a major player in forming policy forEU and UN bodies fighting narcotics, turns out to favour the legalisation of cannabis and other dangerous substances. He boasts of acting as a fifth column for the pro-drugs lobby. It is, of course, difficult to believe anything this government says. But if ministers have any interest in preventing the deaths of thousands of youngsters on sink estates, they will agitate for this treacherous and irresponsible creature to be removed from his international posts without delay.”

HNN-comment: It ought to be evident to anybody that Mike Trace, who is actively undermining the UN Convention on Drugs, should be removed immediately from his post at the United Nations in Vienna and any other international positions that he holds. * The so-called ‘agency’s name is Forward Thinking on Drugs

Laughable if it wasnt so manipulative of ‘democracy’.
Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com

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Human Rights a Drug War Casualty

Image via Wikipedia The drug war’s dirty washing is exhibited everyday in popular media, absent scrutiny or oversight from academic or civil society.

I suspect all those living in this institution we call New Zealand would be generally appalled if it were argued that by our collective (in)actions we were held to be unfit members of the UN, yet everyday we incarcerate and continue to deprive the freedom of thousands of people in the name of compliance with one UN “Single Convention” – and to what end?

I have on many occasions raised the glaring human rights anomaly with government select committee and commissions including the NZ Human Rights Commissioner Rosslyn Noonan.

It has been the character of the response that ‘drugs are illegal’ and that people may choose not to consume them, thus consumption or possession is not a ‘rights issue’, rather society has the preeminent right to be protected from drugs’ harms and consumers. Else why the law?

This is wrong. It doesn’t matter how one spins the moral probity of drugs on society and the self, it is still wrong. It is not a little wrong, nor is it a little right. It is neither gray nor fudgeable. UN Drug policy focused on punitive ‘consequences’ purportedly sending signals to some market has delivered the very market it set out to eliminate. It is a policy that is condemned by its own failure that one can legitimately ask “what is the moral probity of those who maintain it?”
.
This week past has seen ‘tit for tat’ claims and counter-claims surrounding Shapelle Corby’s kilo’s. Another, incarcerated for 20 years for possessing enough methamphetamine one could sneeze and the evidence would have been mere vapours. Yet another, a candidate whom has stood his good name before his electorate and has politically and actively engaged for reasoned drug policy now stands charged with possession of 1.6grams of cannabis plant (ESR weighed it)material – doubtless with ‘active’ THC in nanogram quantities. All this in the same week that the Health Select Committee was hearing from NORML and others about the undoubted efficacy of the herb. [Sativex/Marinol proves the lie]. Methamphetamine is a prescription drug so safe it is given to Children (Ritalin) and to stroke sufferers. It’s prevalence and associated harms are a product of the very rules intended to protects us. There is little in the pharmacology of methamphetamine that redeems it as an ‘illegal stimulant’. It is not a good drug by any means.. but the more dangerous a drug is the less responsible it is of governments to abrogate its control, distribution, profits and quality to unaccountable networks.

So do drug users have human rights? or are we to maintain the notion that 52% of adult NZer’s are so craven that they should be deprived of their liberty, possessions and future options simply because we REFUSE TO BELEIVE they, drugs or consumers have any worth. For that is the PREJUDICE masked by this LAW. It is wrong. It must change. It is institutionalised ‘othering’ of people’s master status expressly prohibited under UN Charter. Discussion within the community is no longer avoidable. Civil Society cannot ignore the unresolved tensions between the ‘UN Single Convention on Narcotics‘ and ‘Human Rights’. And is so doing it must engage those whose ‘other status’ has for too long been ignored. It is the stuff of social capital.

Protection of human rights is clearly, specifically and repeatedly identified as one of the purposes of the UN in the Charter, and as a specific legal obligation of all UN member states, whereas drug control has been conceived from the outset as a subset of the higher aims of the Organisation and its Members.

Furthermore, the Charter’s own provisions make it clear that Charter obligations take precedence over other, conflicting treaty obligations. The principal recommendation making body of the UN, the General Assembly, has specifically stated that drug control ‘must be carried out in full conformity with the
purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and other provisions of international law, and in particular with full respect for…all human rights and fundamental freedoms, and on the basis of the principles of equal rights and mutual respect.’

If a principal organ of the UN directs that drug control must be in conformity with human rights, then this must be reflected in the operations of the UN. Human rights violations stemming from drug control must be highlighted and brought to an end, and the drug control machinery must adopt a rights-based approach to its work in order to avoid complicity in human rights abuses and to influence domestic implementation of the international drug control conventions in line with human rights norms. / http://www.beckleyfoundation.org/pdf/report_13.pdf

Blair Anderson

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