Jamie Doward’s admirable special report rightly stressed the importance of the UN general assembly special session on drugs (Ungass) to be held in New York later this month.(“Is the prohibition era finally coming to an end?”, News).
As Doward makes clear, the international drugs trade is an ongoing problem that affects all countries but reaches crisis level in producer and transit countries. It is to a very large degree the product of the well intentioned but misguided UN conventions that imposed drugs prohibition on all countries without regard for their cultures or traditions.
The evidence that the harms prohibition creates are much greater than any benefits has long been overwhelming. (I witnessed it in Pablo Escobar’s bloody narco-terrorist campaign in Colombia in the early 90s.) Since then, the drugs trade has fuelled extraordinary levels of violence in Mexico, Central America, Venezuela and Afghanistan, to name just the most dramatic cases.
A reformist group, led by Colombia and Mexico, has secured calls for greater flexibility for individual countries in the draft document of the forthcoming Ungass. But the prohibitionist bloc, led by Russia and China, has blocked any study of the failures of the system.
Uruguay, several US states, and soon Canada too, are experimenting with regulated markets in cannabis. This is the pragmatic way forward and will be followed by others. Let us hope that the world leaders meeting in New York will show more vision than the officials who prepared the draft document and, recognising the inevitability of change, signal the need for the conventions to take account of it.
Sir Keith Morris
Ambassador to Colombia 1990-94
London SE19
Communities ripped apart
Your feature and editorial “The threatened local cafe that tells a bigger story of lost values” (Comment) describes the policy of City of London Corporation as “wilful vandalism… that amounts to a nasty tear in the fabric of the community”.
This is not just happening to cafes. The same policy is destroying locally rooted voluntary action all over the country, and here in Adur, West Sussex, as long-standing community relationships, traditionally and effectively nurtured by local authority grant aid, are ripped apart by the process of competitive tendering. Voluntary sector services are frequently no longer accountable to locally based organisations, so the link between “place” and “people” is severed in a manner little short of tragic.
For a decade, the National Coalition for Independent Action was the solitary voice against this destruction and Observer readers can access its website at independentaction.net
Adrian Barritt
Chief officer
Adur Voluntary Action
Shoreham-by-Sea
Academies raise big concerns
The plans to force all schools to become academies raise many questions (“Tory backbench leader in attack on ‘forced’ academies”, News). How will our schools will be democratically accountable, in particular to their communities?
Will academies have control over admissions? If so, what will happen to children with learning difficulties and behaviour problems? What will happen to out-of-school activities such as orchestras at present run by local authorities ? Will land on which local authority schools are built be requisitioned by the government? If so, what compensation will be given to local authorities? The government says it wants to free schools from red tape. But it is the government that imposes the national curriculum.
Jenny Maxwell
Craven Arms
Shropshire
The glory of Hadid in Oxford
In his appreciation of Zaha Hadid (New, Review), Rowan Moore mentions “a library in Oxford” as one of the relatively few of her designs realised in the UK. Rather more than a library, the Investcorp building, which was opened last January at St Antony’s College, Oxford, is the latest extension of Oxford’s Middle East Centre, first opened at St Antony’s in 1960 and a major hub for the study of the complexities of Middle Eastern pasts, presents, and futures. In her speech at the opening, Zaha Hadid stressed the metaphor and realisation of the Investcorp building as an architectural and intercultural bridge, and so it is, one of her smaller buildings, but for Oxford immense, and the most beautiful building to have been created in the city so far this century.
Bruce Ross-Smith
Oxford
Gielgud’s ‘art to enchant’
I read Ian McKellen’s choice of the 10 best Shakespearean performances on film with great interest (“‘The best films don’t just use the bard, they translate him’”, New Review, but he made no reference to John Gielgud, who gave us stunning performances 40 years apart. The first was as Cassius in the 1953 Hollywood Julius Caesar and the second was in 1991 in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, where he not only played the title role but also voiced every line in the play.
John Miller
Alresford
Hampshire
