In my latest Reefer Madness post I made this assertion…
Reefer Madness: Legalizing pot in no way makes us safer | NORML’s Daily Audio Stash
Agent Capra, when Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, you might remind him that according to the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA, the EU’s ONDCP) latest report entitled…
…which elicited this response from a reader in the Netherlands who is much better informed about the EMCDDA (or “Emkah Daddy”, I like to call it):
One small remark; EMCDDA in Lisbon is not at all like ONDCP in DC. It is a data collection enterprise, and puts national data together into an EU report. It is excluded from any policy design activites although it does publish studies about euro drug policy issues, e.g. prevention (the global fairy tale!) It has a managment board in which bureaucrats from all 27 EU members, and a Director (was a German guy, now a French one) and a small staff, with a total budget of around 9 million euro annually. Most conspicuous difference with ONDCP is that it can not pollute the world with weird and truthless TV propaganda or support ads in papers, and its director does not mix in policy issues anywhere.
So I thought about trying to use a different US agency to make the metaphor work — NIDA, SAMSHA, NIH — and I just don’t think they fit either. Leave it to the Europeans to actually collect data then make conclusions.
