European efforts to curb cocaine and heroin use made little impact in the past year, the EU's main drugs watchdog says in its annual report.

But cannabis use, particularly among young people, is declining, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).

bbc.co.uk

EMCDDA 2009 Annual report

WLEW-AM reports a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter late Friday spotted a small plane drop seven or eight large bags onto the runway about 75 miles north of Detroit. Authorities say the plane picked up one bag and took off.

The sheriff's department says authorities found more than 300 pounds of ecstasy and more than 100 pounds of marijuana.

connectmidmichigan.com

A third chemical – cocaethylene – builds up in the liver over a number of years among those who mix the two drugs. And this is now having major health consequences

"I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher," a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

u.tv

Cocaine is a central commodity of the neoliberal age; so, too, its re-processed form (“crack”) for the desperately poor in de-industrialized cities of the North and South Atlantic. First announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, the “War on Drugs” predates the rise of cocaine and crack by nearly a decade, but in the 1980s and 90s the “War on Drugs” was redoubled in response to the explosion of the cocaine business. It now ranks as the U.S.’s longest-running military-police campaign. Thus if we look at cocaine as a social hieroglyph—not as a thing, but as a complex relation between networks and organizations of people, as well as between states and bureaucracies—we may glimpse some of the distinguishing features of the contemporary world.

brooklynrail.org