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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Colombia: Distant positions over legalization of narcotics
Octavio Gomez V. Medellin El Colombiano (Colombia)
Thursday 23 Aug 2001 Translated From Spanish By www.narconews.com Two sides, without common ground, were drawn between Congress and the government on the theme of narcotics: One side proposes legalizing their production, distribution and consumption and the other, headed by the government, defends its combat through repressive means. The new debate, coming out of the polemic over the aerial fumigation of illicit crops, began on Thursday when, in Cartagena, in the Andean Assembly, the candidate of the Social and Political Front, Luis Eduardo Garzon, proposed that "the best way to end this problem and the war it has brought us is to legalize drugs." In the same sense, but with a specific goal, the Independent Senator Viviane Morales announced in front of the entire Senate on Tuesday the presentation of a bill to permit legalization and that also would place the government in charge of the production, distribution and sale of narcotics. The moment she ended her presentation, the Interior Minister Armando Estrada Villa took the podium to characterize the proposal as "inconvenient and harmful," because the government must comply with its international deals against the traffic and consumption of drugs "and this would leave us alone against the world." Estrada Villa recalled the agreements signed in the United Nations and the Organization of American States that fixed the policies of prohibition of the consumption of drugs and combat against narco-trafficking. In the same tenor, Senator Claudia Blum said that legalization can only come out of a "grand international agreement." She said that the prestige of the Congress obliges it to bury initiatives like that of her colleague Morales "that have political-electoral goals." The surprise, however, was delivered on Friday by the president of the National Conservative Board, Carlos Holguin Sardi, who said the country should construct a "national agreement" to legalize drugs and that the initiative should be coordinated with other Andean nations and the European Union, although he recognized that "it is a very large task." "The world believes that repression is the better way to fight against this plague," he said, advising that the real policy would be to convert it into a problem of public health.
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