Quick Hits (page 5)
Nato Happy to Ignore Explosion in Afghan Opium Output, says Russia
By: Richard Norton-Taylor and agencies (The Guardian)
Nato is turning a blind eye to the flourishing opium trade in Afghanistan to ensure the support of warlords in the struggle to maintain security in the country, Russia's defence minister has claimed.
Sergei Ivanov said Afghanistan was now producing nine times the quantity of drugs it did under the Taliban.
"It is understandable that by allowing drug peddling in Afghanistan, the [Nato] alliance ensures loyalty of warlords on the ground and of some Afghan leaders," he said.
"Nevertheless, the drug flow from Afghanistan is posing a serious threat to the national security of all of the central Asian CIS [confederation of independent states] and Russia. It results from the absence of a truly international approach toward stabilisation in Afghanistan."
Mr Ivanov was speaking at an international security conference in Munich where Nato countries, including Britain, debated whether to increase their military presence in Afghanistan.
His comments came as at least 20 people were reported killed and 40 wounded in north-eastern Afghanistan in clashes over the payment of taxes on the opium poppy crop.
The Munich meeting coincided with an international conference in Kabul, called to discuss ways to combat the trade.
The Afghan poppy crop is estimated to be the raw material for 90% of the heroin in Britain, but little ends up in the US.
The UN estimates that Afghan opium production last year amounted to a record 3,600 tonnes - an increase of 6% on the previous year - and said that surveys of farmers suggested that a further increase was likely this year.
UN officials have voiced concern because the crop is spreading to parts of the country where it has not been grown before.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has estimated that the output could be worth $2.3bn. The country's total official exports to its neighbour Pakistan are worth about one-sixtieth of that.
Whitehall officials privately accuse the US of giving a low priority to the issue, as it needs the warlords to help combat Taliban and al-Qaida remnants and other Islamist fighters.
Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, told the Munich conference that Britain had offered to lead an expanded Nato peacekeeping mission in northern Afghanistan. "We are prepared to take command of the northern region group," he said.
Officials said Britain would lead a network of Nato military teams based in five or six cities across a swath of northern territory. The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that five such teams of 80 to 300 soldiers could be in place by June, when national elections are due.
However, the US has made it clear that the mandate for Nato's peacekeepers would be separate from that of US troops in search of al-Qaida fighters and Osama bin Laden.
Official sources told Reuters yesterday that the latest clashes involving the opium trade involved the forces of two government commanders in the Argo district.
The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said fighting had not stopped until Sunday morning in a dispute between the two commanders about who would receive a tax on the district's poppy crop.
About 100 members of the security forces have been sent from Faizabad, the provincial capital of Badakhshan, to stop the fighting, authorities said, adding that the locals wanted the central government to step in because they did not trust provincial officials.
Growin' Our Own (page 5)
Armchair Drug Detection
By: Kris Maher (The Wall Street Journal)
On a recent evening after most workers had gone home from Robert M. Sides Inc., a music company in Williamsport, Pa., three men went through the offices testing for the presence of drugs.
They brushed a narrow plastic tool that resembles a home-pregnancy test across telephone receivers, computer keyboards and mouses, calculator keys, doorknobs, armrests and a coffeepot handle. Walking past worktables holding tools and stripped-down saxophones, they wiped vise handles and light switches. In a bathroom, they dragged the tool across the hot and cold fixtures of a sink.
Like forensics experts at a crime scene, the men worked quietly, while Alysha Sides, the company's marketing director and a co-owner, stood a few feet away. When one test came up positive for cannabis, she leaned close to the device and frowned as she looked at a faint red line that signaled the presence of the drug.
"This has given us a great opportunity to get a sneak peek at what's going on," she said.
That peek represents a new twist in screening employees, a process that has been stepped up at many companies since 9/11. While some big employers, such as Home Depot Inc., require pre-employment drug tests of all new employees, many businesses are reluctant to screen current workers by requiring a urine sample -- a state of affairs that's a perfect opportunity for Global Detection & Reporting Inc.
Pre-Employment Background Checks Increase
Based in New York, Global Detection markets the drug-wipe test used by Robert M. Sides and more than 100 other small employers in the past year. Since the drug wipe isn't normally used to pinpoint individual usage, Global Detection says it is less invasive. It is also less costly than traditional drug testing.
Global Detection says it costs employers $10 per employee for a "general assessment" of an office, testing for the presence of five drugs, including cannabis and cocaine. By comparison, a single urine-screen test performed by a laboratory to determine if an individual has recently used drugs is typically about $35.
Legal experts say workers would have little recourse against such testing, just as they can't stop a company from accessing e-mails written on a company computer. "Anything that's in the workplace is fair game for a company," says Lawrence Lorber, a partner in the labor and employment practice group in the Washington, D.C., office of New York law firm Proskauer Rose LLP. In general, he says, corporate drug-testing policies have almost universally held up to challenges in court.
The drug-wipe test works by collecting minute amounts of drugs secreted by the skin. Since trace amounts of drugs are commonly passed on items like dollar bills, the tool is calibrated to register amounts large enough to come from usage or direct handling. In the U.S., the test, which is made by Securetec Contraband Detection & Identification Inc. of Williamsport, Pa., is widely used by law-enforcement agencies, including roughly 1,000 state and local groups, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Customs.
Last May, Thomas B. Keller CPA, a nine-employee accounting firm in Montoursville, Pa., had its offices tested one weekend for cannabis, opiates, cocaine and amphetamines. Employees were told the following week about the test, which used the Global Detection system. "They were a little surprised," says Lori Moore, the firm's administrator. But she adds, "We got the results we wanted." No surfaces tested positive for drugs. She says the firm would not have conducted a drug test that required employees to submit to individual testing.
Now the firm plans to hang a banner in its reception area, declaring that it is a drug-free workplace. "It's something we'd be more than happy to have our clients notice," says Ms. Moore. "We feel we have bragging rights."
Ron Rutherford, who owns Intelisource Inc., a Cincinnati drug-testing company, has used the Global Detection test to screen about 20 companies in the past year and believes that because of its simplicity "it's going to take off like a rocket into space." But several potential clients opted not to use the test due to concerns that employees would react negatively.
"Some of them view it as being kind of sneaky," he says of companies he approached. Half of the workplaces he did test showed the presence of drugs.
Using the test could also prove tricky for many employers who want to zero in on workers whom they suspect of using drugs. For one thing, a single drug-wipe test is typically used to test multiple work spaces. In addition, even if a phone or keyboard tests positive for drugs, testing the surface alone doesn't rule out contamination from another person.
On the other hand, the test could be useful to detect the presence of drugs generally. "If a company wanted to employ this to get a general pulse check on is there drug use in the workplace, I think that could be information that is worth putting into the mix," says Bram Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Drug Litigation Policy Project. He worries however that some employers could use the test to harass or try to get rid of certain employees. "I can't imagine any circumstance where residue that is on a surface is used as the basis for punishing any one person," he says.
Kevin Brodsky, president of Buchanan Brodsky Enterprises Inc., a Sarasota, Fla., company that operates 19 car dealerships and has a staff of about 1,000, has taken the drug-wipe test beyond testing surfaces and now spot tests employees. Six months ago, Mr. Brodsky suspected that an employee in the finance department at one dealership was using cocaine, even though the employee had passed a laboratory drug test. One day, he called the employee into his office while a drug-testing concern tested the employee's office using the drug-wipe test. When the employee was shown a positive reading from his office, he confessed that he was using cocaine and that he had previously substituted another urine sample for his own. The employee agreed to enter a rehabilitation program, and Mr. Brodsky later rehired him as a salesperson.
Not long after, Mr. Brodsky bought a box of drug wipes for himself. Now he tests that employee once a week by rubbing a drug-wipe across the employee's forehead. "It's a pretty neat technology," Mr. Brodsky says, adding, "If I see somebody who gets in an accident or is acting weird I can test them right there."
Officials at Robert M. Sides say the company wants to use the wipe test in the workplace generally -- for now -- and hopes the test itself will be a deterrent for employees. Says Ms. Sides: "Am I going to run around and fire people? No, that's not the response." After the recent test, she held a staff meeting to inform workers about the test and to allay any fears that the company would use the results to target individuals.
In that recent test, the faint reading of cannabis left open the possibility that someone who had merely passed through the offices had left traces of the drug behind. The company plans to continue drug testing its offices on a regular basis as it develops a policy that could call for testing individual employees.
"We're going to cut this off at the pass," says Hugh Sides, the company's chief executive. "We would like to be able to say that we have a drug- free environment."
Pipeline (page 5)
Privacy in Retreat
By: William Safire (NY Times)
WASHINGTON -- "I believe privacy is a fundamental right," said the candidate George W. Bush one month before his election, "and that every American should have absolute control over his or her personal information."
Those of us agitating against snoopery -- facilitated by databanks and newly invasive surveillance -- were further assured when we elicited Bush's on-the-record promise to "guarantee the privacy of medical and sensitive financial records."
But after 9/11, the passion went out of advocacy of privacy. The right to be let alone had to be balanced against the right to stay alive.
Accordingly, we readily submit to preboarding searches, right down to our shoes. We tolerate foreigner-fingerprinting at our borders. We live with hidden security cameras near national monuments or bridges.
Benumbed by the fear of appearing insufficiently vigilant, we accept "cookies" on our computers that track our habits and electronic location devices in our cars that guide our way but never let us wander about unobserved. We don't know whether our nosy neighbor is taking his cellphone call or taking our picture. We let our most confidential e-mail be shared among our spies, our cops and our military. To keep our national defense up, we have let our personal defenses down.
Terror's threat is real. But as we grudgingly grant government more leeway to guard our lives, we must demand that our protectors be especially careful to safeguard our rights. Officials all too often fail to see both sides of their jobs.
As reported last week by Robert Pear and Eric Lichtblau in The Times, the Justice Department said that medical patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential."
This abhorrent philosophy underlies a counterattack launched by Justice at doctors who went to court to challenge the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. Most Americans, including many who are pro-choice, favor that legislation. I think the doctors are mistaken in their constitutional objection. But in defending the law, Attorney General John Ashcroft went overboard.
Justice issued subpoenas to hospitals in several cities across the nation for the medical records of hundreds of women who had undergone abortions. After hospitals protested that the order flew in the face of federal and state privacy laws, Justice offered to allow the individual names to be blotted out. In Chicago, Northwestern Memorial argued in court that patients would not trust such redaction of their records -- copies of which would pass through hundreds of hands -- to keep private such an intimate procedure.
The judge quashed the subpoena, but Justice is appealing. "Congress created a zone of privacy relating to medical information," says Chicago Congressman Rahm Emanuel. "Who would have thought the first one to violate it would be the federal government?" Medical records contain dates of treatment, doctors' names, prescriptions -- all clues to identity. Who would not be deterred from going to a hospital that meekly passed along those records?
This intrusion cannot be justified by a claim to protect the nation from a terror attack. In Pittsburgh, however, the F.B.I. has set up a pilot Strategic Medical Intelligence unit under that very rubric. Doctors in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are expected to notify S.M.I. bioterror experts of any "suspicious event," from an unusual rash to a finger lost in an explosion, identifying but not informing the patient.
It's proper for a doctor to report a case of spousal or child abuse to the police, or to query the Centers for Disease Control about a mysterious infection. But how do patients feel about their doctors first secretly calling the F.B.I.? Where is the oversight to protect the innocent injured or ill? Where is the patient's informed consent?
A balance must be struck between protecting all of us and protecting each one of us. I don't trust Justice or the C.I.A. to strike that balance. I have more faith in the courts and Congress, and -- if he would remember his stand on personal freedom -- in George W. Bush.
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