Three New Zealanders Have Spent 2+ Months in Detention in the UAE, Still Uncharged After Drug Bust

Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman who
stopped using drugs in 2009 and launched Project SAM, a well-funded
marijuana prohibitionist group,
likes to say that “incarceration is a powerful motivator.” As a
Kennedy, he must now this primarily from theory, not practice.
Nevertheless, even as a theory it’s a weak one. Forty years of drug
war has been a failure
by almost any measure, even as America’s prison population
ranks as highest in the world. Incarceration doesn’t seem to be
motivating anyone outside of the drug warriors in law enforcement,
and elsewhere in government and out of it, who profit with their
very livelihoods from the criminalization of drugs. Could drug laws
be harsher?

Consider the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where
the New Zealand Herald reports three citizens of New
Zealand have been detained since December after some kind of drug
bust, and none have yet been charged. One appeared for a ten-minute
hearing, which ended with an adjournment for three weeks. The
New Zealand Herald notes that the UAE has harsh drug laws;
one Briton in 2012 was sentenced to death by firing squad for
selling less than an ounce of marijuana. The threat of death
penalty hasn’t stamped out the UAE’s people engaging in non-violent
activity problem “drug problem.”  Twelve people have
been sentenced to death in the country since 2007, though the
Herald stresses that an appeals process involving up to 19
judges means none of them have been executed, yet. And a UAE
prosecutor
claims up to 30 men in the country of 9 million died of alleged
overdoses last year.