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CUBA UNDERTAKES WAR ON DRUGS.

Article Excerpt
In recent weeks, the Cuban government has tried to elevate national awareness of the threat from illegal drug sales and consumption. The campaign is backed by a powerful new law, extensive television and print coverage, and greatly increased educational efforts. At the same time, the government has called attention to the US refusal to enter into a joint anti-narcotics agreement with Cuba.

Official acknowledgement that drug use is on the rise in Cuba is not new. President Fidel Castro called attention to it in 1999 when he referred to an Interior Ministry report that said arrests in drug cases had doubled between 1997 and 1998.

The stepped-up campaign got underway Jan. 10, with an editorial in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, which talked of a drug trade ceaselessly expanding around the world.

The editorial said that there was an "incipient" domestic market in drugs and that it was growing with the increase in tourism and the diversion into the Cuban market of drugs bound for the US and Europe. "While neoliberal globalization is stimulating narcomafias to seek out new routes, methods, and markets to continue expanding, Cuba...is also confronting greater threats and risks posing dangerous...

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