|
CICAD broadens participation from partners |
CICAD Signs Cooperation Agreements
with Brazil (SENAD)
and with Chile (CONACE)
José Miguel Insulza
OAS Secretary General
The Inter-American Drug
Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) has launched an initiative to enlist more
active participation of CICAD member states and their specialized agencies
in CICAD activities through horizontal cooperation. The goal is to take
advantage of information, knowledge, expertise and advisory services that
can be transferred between and among the member states themselves while
broadening CICAD’s reach in the fight against illicit drugs.
This initiative was endorsed by OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza at
the inauguration of the thirty-eighth meeting of CICAD in December 2005 when
he stated: "CICAD's initiatives to supplement its activities with horizontal
cooperation have been grounded in the real needs of the member states,
backed up by political commitment and administered with effectiveness." He
said that horizontal cooperation would be a keystone of the OAS’s next
strategic plan and challenged CICAD member states to "view themselves as
full and equal partners, not as beneficiaries in assistance programs."
Chile and
Brazil stepped forward to join CICAD in promoting strategic activities that
will increase all CICAD member states’ capacity to deal with the drug
problem: to prepare professionals capable of dealing with the complex issues
stemming for the illicit drug trade and its impact on society, and to assist
other member states in setting up school-based prevention programs with
training and follow-up monitoring.
Complete article in
HTML or
PDF
|
|
Program to Estimate Costs of Drugs in the Americas: Pilot Delivers Report |
|
The Link Between Drug Consumption and Productivity in Costa Rica |
|
Chile Puts a Number on Illegal Drug Market |
|
NIDA
Research Report Series - Marijuana Abuse |
CESAR Fax
More People Being Treated
for Drugs Other Than Alcohol |
Announcements
and News |
CICAD Delivers Costs Study to Summit of the Americas
Renewed Mandates to Combat Illicit Drugs
At the Summit of the Americas at Mar del Plata, Argentina, November 4-5,
2005, CICAD delivered the findings of the program to estimate the human,
social and economic costs of the drug problem in the Americas. During the
pilot phase, the study had the participation of six countries: Barbados,
Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay.
Working with the project team of the Inter-American Observatory on Drugs
(OID), the investigating team of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of
New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (UMDNJ/RWJMS) also prepared a
manual detailing the methodology followed and also drafted the study.
Findings were also presented at the thirty-eight ordinary session of CICAD
in December, made available on the
OID website and will be published in hard
copy in early 2006.
Ms. Tessa Chaderton-Shaw, the Director of Barbados’s National Council on
Substance Abuse, said that its participation in the pilot program was one of
the most challenging undertakings that the council had ever attempted,
testing the data collection capacity of the country on a variety of levels.
The delegate noted, however, that the benefits far outweighed the obstacles,
and they hope that Barbados’ experience will serve as a model for other
small countries.
At the Summit, the heads of government renewed the mandate to study the
costs of drugs on society and expand it. For the next stage of this project,
the governments of Argentina, Colombia and Peru, which had been
participating as observers in the pilot stage, expressed their interest
officially in taking part in the program and beginning their respective
studies. Colombia presented a proposal to carry out a study on the segments
attributable to drug crime, and Argentina delivered a proposal for
estimation of the costs of the drug problem in this country. In addition,
the OID team will be carrying out a pilot for "avoidable costs," those
factors that are influenced by government policies and programs.
In addition, there was a new mandate to “develop, implement, and
evaluate substance abuse prevention programs, in particular for children and
young people, such as ‘Life Skills’.” The heads of state also asked that
CICAD continue to promote support for “integral and sustainable development
strategies carried out by the countries affected by cultivation and
production of illicit drugs.”
Find the relevant text of the
Summit mandates on the CICAD web site. |
The Link Between Drug Consumption
and Productivity in Costa Rica
By
Franklin Jimenez Rojas, Institute on Alcoholism and Narcotics
Eugenia Mata Chavarría, Costa Rican Institute on Drugs
The following study was born out of knowledge, obtained from developed countries,
that indicates that
consumption of psychoactive substances in the economically active
population and the work force have a strong impact on productivity,
both in the private and public workplace.
Likewise, one of the main
purposes was to obtain an initial approach to the problem in Costa Rica,
through which some of the principal characteristics of the problem of drug
consumption in the economically active population are specified and directed
to strengthen the basis for estimating the costs to the Costa Rican
society in terms of lost productivity.
With this in mind, achieving experience
that define and measure the different particularities that link drug
consumption and the workplace is important
because it permits us to establish fundamentals for actions meant to establish
and lead to the diminishment of the problem and its consequences.
This issue is included in
the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism and in the Project to Estimate the
Social, Human and Economic Costs of Drugs in the Americas, both
sponsored by CICAD. This study started from two considerations about the way
drug consumption affects the workplace:
- Causing losses
related to the health and safety of the individual, and the company due
to the increased risk of labor accidents and fatalities; loss of
work time due to injuries, illness, chronic illness associated
with drug abuse and the consequences of disabling injuries.
- Generating losses
related to productivity due to reduced output, due to diminished
work capacity, excessive absenteeism, increased tardiness and job
loss.
Consequently, it is crucial that each country obtain its own data and, ideally with its own methodology,
starting from what already exists; in consideration that in this matter,
inferring from the experience of others is not recommended.
Complete
article in
PDF and
HTML (only in Spanish)
|
|
CONACE, Chile’s national drug abuse control council, has published a study
about the
illicit drug market in Chile, drawing on data from the sixth
national study of the general population. The methodology applied to the
three main illicit drugs consumed in Chile (marijuana, cocaine and coca
paste) account for about 50 billion Chilean pesos (US$ 83 million) a year.
The figures are based on prevailing market prices for the drug, estimates
of daily consumption drawn from survey responses and the figures for drug
captures during the same period.
The 29-page document (Adobe Acrobat file 385kb) is
in the format of a presentation. It is located the
Virtual Library
where other useful documents can be found.
The material is available only in Spanish.
|
Research Report Series - Marijuana Abuse
Marijuana, Memory, and the Hippocampus
An extract from the publication according to the US National Institute on
Drug Abuse (NIDA):
Marijuana's damage to short-term memory seems to occur because THC* alters the way in which information is processed by the hippocampus, a brain area responsible for memory formation. Laboratory rats treated with THC (Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the main active ingredient in marijuana, which acts on the brain to produce its effects) displayed the same reduced ability to perform tasks requiring short-term memory as other rats showed after nerve cells in their hippocampus were destroyed. In addition, the THC-treated rats had the greatest difficulty with the tasks precisely during the time when the drug was interfering most with the normal functioning of cells in the hippocampus.
As people age, they normally lose neurons in the hippocampus, which decreases their ability to remember events. Chronic THC exposure may hasten the age-related loss of hippocampal neurons. In one series of studies, rats exposed to THC every day for 8 months (approximately 30 percent of their lifespan), when examined at 11 to 12 months of age, showed nerve cell loss equivalent to that of unexposed animals twice their age.
*THC: Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol; the main active ingredient in
marijuana, which acts on the brain to produce its effects.
Full Report in
HTML
or PDF
|
|
CESAR Fax
More People Being Treated
for Drugs Other Than Alcohol
November 21, 2005 Volume 14, Issue 47
Center of Substance Abuse Research
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Substance abuse treatment clients [in the United States] are increasingly more likely to be treated for drugs other than alcohol, according to data from the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), an annual survey of all public and private substance abuse treatment facilities in the United States. The percentage of clients in treatment solely for the abuse of drugs other than alcohol increased from 26.9% in 1998 to 34.0% in 2004. At the same time, the percentage of clients in treatment for alcohol abuse only decreased from 23.8% to 19.8%. Declines also occurred for clients being treated for both alcohol and other drug abuse. According to the survey, there were more than one million people receiving treatment at the more than 14,000 substance abuse treatment facilities in 2004.*
It is unclear whether these findings reflect actual changes in substance abuse and dependence or are a result of other factors, such as changes in insurance policies or access to treatment.
See the online report for additional details on survey
methodology in
PDF, available only in English.
|
|
MEM:
The Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM)
is holding a meeting of the Inter-Governmental Working Group (IWG) to
determine the criteria, procedures and scheduling for the next evaluation
round (2004-06) on February 21-25 in Washington, D.C.
Demand
Reduction:
A workshop on the evaluation of substance
abuse prevention programs was held in Grenada on January 31 – February 2. ::: A combined National Seminar on Demand
Reduction Policy and National Treatment Workshop is to be held in Colombia
on February 20-24. ::: The Central American Conference on
Addressing Drug Use among Prisoners and Released Offenders is to meet in
Antigua, Guatemala on February 27-March 3. ::: A workshop on the evaluation of substance
abuse prevention programs is to be held in the Bahamas on March 7-9.
Legal Development
Under the auspices of the Secretariat of the Coordinating Committee of the
Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and
Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials
(CIFTA) and the “Plan of Bogota” that sets out measures for bringing the
Convention into full effect, an expert group reviewed the drafting of model
legislation on the marking of firearms and ammunition in early February in
Washington, DC.
Supply Reduction:
A meeting of the Expert Group on Maritime Drug Trafficking is to be held in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (April 3-7). :::
The
Andean Community Regional Counter Drug Intelligence School (ECRAIAD) will
hold a seminar on Strategic Intelligence in March in Bogota, Colombia (March
12 – 17). :::
A
one-week training seminar on chemical control and officer safety for law
enforcement officers from Caribbean member states is to be held in
partnership with Regional Drug Law Enforcement Training Centre (REDTRAC) at
their training center in Spanish Town, Jamaica (April 3 – 7). :::
A
one-week training seminar on risk assessment and targeting of containers and
passengers for officers from the Central America is being offered in
collaboration with France’s Centre Interministeriel de Formation
Anti-Drogue (CIFAD) in Cartagena, Colombia on April 17 - 21).Training seminars on specialized issues related to the control of illicit
drug production, distribution and related activities for law enforcement
officer of CICAD member states to be delivered in partnership with the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP):
- Advanced Investigative Techniques for Central America in San Jose, Costa
Rica, February 13-17
-
Advanced Investigative Techniques for the Caribbean in Montego Bay, Jamaica,
February 27-March 3
- Establishing and maintaining undercover programs and operations in Santo
Domingo, Dominican Republic, March 6-17
Educational Development and Research:
EDRU has convoked 13 Schools of Education from eight countries in Latin
America to meet in San Jose, Costa Rica on March 1-3 to discuss introducing more drug-related content into their curriculum.
:::
In
October last year in Lima, Peru, EDRU held a conference that brought
together 14 schools of public health to discuss how they could introduce
more drug-related content and international perspective into their curricula
to better prepare professionals to deal with the drug problem and its
impact.
In
its November-December 2005 issue, the
Latin American Journal of Nursing
began publishing articles resulting from
CICAD’s collaboration with the University of Alberta's School of Nursing
(Edmonton, Canada) in a program to prove the research capacity of nurses to
study the drug problem in the Americas in 2003. Article abstracts
are available in Portuguese, Spanish and English while full text versions
are in their original language.
Monitoring the Future: the
2005 Data From In-School Surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-Grade Students
has just been made available. The survey is carried out by the
University of Michigan for the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) of
the United States. It is an ongoing study of the behaviors, attitudes, and
values of American secondary school students, college students, and young
adults. Each year, a total of approximately 50,000 8th, 10th and 12th grade
students are surveyed (12th graders since 1975, and 8th and 10th graders
since 1991). Also the 1975-2004
reference volumes are available to follow national trends in smoking,
drinking, and illicit drug use among American secondary school students,
college students and adults through age 45. It looks at drug use and
availability. The information is available only in English.
The
2004 Report of the Spanish Drug Observatory (Situación y tendencias de
los problemas de drogas en España) is
available online. The 180-page document reports on surveys of drug use and problems that
arise out of drug abuse, as well as the drug supply and efforts to control
it. The Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo maintains a
catalogue of materials online, including its national drug strategy and
action plan.
El Comercio (Quito, Ecuador):
"El
Consejo Antilavado aprobó un reglamento" acknowledges CICAD’s support
for new regulations and the Financial Intellligence Unit:
"La Comisión Interamericana para el Control del Abuso de Drogas (Cicad), de
la Organización de Estados Americanos, también colabora para la
implementación de la nueva oficina. Ecuador es beneficiario del proyecto
denominado de Asistencia para la Creación y Desarrollo de Unidades de
Investigaciones Financieras para Centro y Sur América."
|
|
This
quarterly newsletter is published electronically and circulated to
encourage discussion and comment. The findings, interpretations, judgments,
and conclusions expressed in this newsletter are those of the author(s) and
should not be attributed to CICAD/OAS.
If you wish to receive an e-mail advising you
about the latest issue
or if you want to be removed from the mailing list,
please contact
msmith@oas.org |
The
OID 
