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The UN rarely takes issue with the internal affairs of member states, and even less with those of the US. But that’s what the International Narcotics Control Board has just done in its latest annual report. Without mentioning by name the 14 American states where marijuana is legal for medical purposes, the 149-page report says:

“While the consumption and cultivation of cannabis, except for scientific purposes, are illegal activities according to federal law in the United States, several states have enacted laws that provide for the ‘medical use’ of cannabis. The control measures applied in those states for the cultivation of cannabis plants and the production, distribution and use fall short of the control requirements laid down in the 1961 Convention (on narcotic drugs).

“The Board is deeply concerned that those insufficient control provisions have contributed substantially to the increase in illicit cultivation and abuse of cannabis in the United States. In addition, that development sends a wrong message to other countries.” The Board’s concern doesn’t end here. It is equally worried over “the ongoing discussion in several states on legalising and taxing the ‘recreational’ use of cannabis.”

California, the most populous state in the US, stands out in that discussion. In mid-February, a California legislator, Tom Ammiamo, introduced a bill that would tax and regulate marijuana (by most estimates the state’s largest cash crop by far) much in the same way as alcohol. In addition, California backers of marijuana legalisation say they have collected more than 700,000 signatures for a ballot initiative likely to be voted on in November.

There’s not the slightest hint in the UN report of rapidly growing support for more liberal laws on marijuana, the world’s most widely-used illicit drug. The latest US poll on the issue, in January, showed that eight out of ten Americans support legalising marijuana for medical use and nearly half are in favor of legalising the drug, in small quantities for personal use, altogether.

Countries that have done that come in for harsh rebuke from the Control Board, which singles out Mexico, Argentina and Brazil for having sent “the wrong message” by passing legislation that takes the crime out of drug use and replaces prison sentences with treatment and education programmes.

UN oversteps the mark
In the eyes of two liberal think tanks, the Washington Office on Latin America and the Transnational Institute, lecturing the US, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil on the way they handle drug use are way off the mark. The rebuke, said a joint statement by the two groups, “clearly oversteps the INCB’s mandate and constitutes unwarranted intrusion into these country’s sovereign decision-making.”

The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed marijuana in the most restrictive category, alongside heroin (as does the US federal government) and for years was seen as a major obstacle to domestic reform in signatory countries. But a follow-up treaty in 1988 provided a measure of flexibility on whether or not drug possession should be treated as a criminal offence.

In the US, for decades the spiritual home of rigid marijuana prohibitionists, President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, last October issued new policy guidelines that marked a milestone in a long-running dispute over whether federal law trumps state law on matters of marijuana. Holder announced that the Justice Department would stop raiding medical marijuana facilities set up under state law.

That was the most high-profile move on drug policy so far in the presidency of Obama, who is on record saying that “the war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalise our marijuana laws…” He made the remark in 2004, when he was running for a seat in the US senate. Speaking about drug policies as a whole, not only on marijuana, as a presidential candidate, Obama said he believed in “shifting the paradigm, shifting the model so that we can focus more on the public health approach.”

In the long-running global dispute over drug strategy, that means treating addicts not as criminals but as patients who deserve care in a public health system. To hear Obama’s drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowski, tell it, that shift is underway. But is it really?

The answer is no, judging from just-released highlights of the national drug control budget for Fiscal Year 2011, which begins in October. It provides for $15.5bn in overall spending, a 3.5 percent increase over 2010, and allots vastly more money to law enforcement ($ 9.9bn) than to addiction treatment and preventive measures ($5.6bn).

Like drug control budgets under President George W Bush, the figures do not include the vast cost of arresting drug offenders and putting them behind bars, a practice that has helped turn the US into the world’s biggest jailer. Factoring in those costs would show that 73 percent of overall spending goes to law enforcement and controlling the supply of drugs, according to John Walsh, a senior expert at WOLA.

Aaron Houston, director of government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project, sees the budget as evidence of recycled Bush policies rather than the paradigm shift Obama promised.

It’s Bush wine in Obama bottles.

“My personal leanings are that it’s more cyclical than a permanent trend,” said Jimmy Pritchard, a Southern Baptist pastor in a Dallas suburb.

“And I think it’s a little presumptuous to put so many resources and energy into something that may change direction in the next few years.”

Such views, widespread in the US heartland, drive conservative opposition to President Obama’s bid to get a bill through Congress that would cap US emissions of the greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

“It’s a very different debate in Europe, where there is no discussion about whether climate change is occurring. But in the United States it is about whether it exists,” said John Wright of pollster Ipsos.

It is a skepticism that stands in contrast with prevailing views in Europe and has been linked to the influence of US talk radio, the “oil lobby”, an enduring love affair with cars, and a history founded on limiting the role of government.

Science can be controversial in a country where evangelical Christians make up a quarter of the adult population. Many, for example, doubt the theory of evolution because they believe it contradicts the Bible.

“In other countries academics hold a more revered position … And so some of these Europeans look at America and say there is all this evidence, why don’t you believe? And many of these American evangelicals say ‘look who’s producing the evidence,'” said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston.

Climate legislation aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions had been a top priority of the Obama administration but like his efforts to reform the expensive healthcare system, it has stalled in Congress.

Countries around the world are waiting to see what the US will do on global warming but there is growing doubt there are enough votes in Congress to pass the legislation in this congressional elections year.

‘A fraud’
In interviews with Americans across the country, global warming is often seen as exaggerated, part of a plot to sabotage the US economy or an intrusion in people’s lives.

“They’ve committed a fraud,” said Nancy Meinhardt, a paralegal in south Miami, referring to efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

A co-chair of her local Tea Party – part of a nationwide conservative grassroots movement leading opposition to Obama’s agenda – Meinhardt said a proposed cap-and-trade regime that would require industry to buy and trade pollution permits would be ruinous.

“Economically, cap and trade will destroy us. Have you any idea how much the electricity bills are going to go up?” she asked.

This is also a theme driven home daily by conservative commentators in the media and by some high-profile talk-radio hosts who say that climate change is a hoax.

They say that action to contain it would destroy a uniquely American way of life, which relies on widespread car ownership, heavy resources consumption, consumerism and an economy, the world’s largest, overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels like oil and coal.

The “Climategate” scandal at the University of East Anglia has bolstered skeptics. Leaked emails from its Climatic Research Unit last year led to allegations that its researchers fudged data to support the case for man-made global warming.

The US House of Representatives narrowly passed a cap-and-trade bill but legislation has stalled in the Senate – and its unpopularity is clearly one reason for the gridlock.

Skepticism runs deep
An opinion poll of more than 1,000 Americans by Ipsos released in December found that 43 percent of Americans blamed global warming on human activities. Around a quarter said temperatures were rising but felt the patterns were natural while 28 percent said global warming was not happening at all.

On a global level, Pew found last year that concern over global warming was far less pronounced in America than elsewhere. It found that 44 percent of Americans thought it was a “very serious problem” versus 90 percent of Brazilians.

In France it was 68 percent and in Japan 65 percent. Other polls have shown similar differences.

Some environmentalists blame the powerful US oil lobby.

“I don’t think it’s that Americans are confused about global warming, it’s that they’re being confused,” said the incoming executive director of conservation group Sierra Club, Michael Brune, who blames big spending by oil, coal and other energy industries. But he did allow some historical context.

“The mechanisms to address climate change can incite long-held fears by many people about government involvement in their lives,” he said.

Of $3bn covered by the agreement, $1.3bn will be cancelled and almost $1.7bn rescheduled, while debt service payments have been deferred until after July 1, 2012.

The agreement follows the IMF’s approval in December of a long-awaited $550m loan arrangement for the DRC, making the country eligible for an IMF debt relief programme.

The Club deferred repayments “on an exceptional basis, considering the Democratic Republic of Congo’s limited capacity of payment”, it said in a statement.

Paris Club creditors said they would be ready to give further relief once Congo reaches completion point under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.

“Now we are waiting for [completion point in] June and the cancellation of 90 percent of our debt,” Congolese central bank director general Jean-Louis Kaymebe told reporters from Paris.

“Then we will be left with a debt stock of $1bn in which our economy is good enough to manage.”

Congo and its creditors said the money the country saves on debt repayments will be spent on poverty alleviation.

“The Democratic Republic of Congo is committed to devote the resources that otherwise would have gone to Paris Club creditors to priority areas identified in the country’s poverty reduction strategy paper,” the statement said.

The mineral-rich but politically unstable and economically fragile central African nation’s debt to the Paris Club stood at $6.9bn at the end of June 2009.

The World Bank and the IMF launched HIPC in 1996 to provide a framework in which creditors can provide debt relief to the world’s poorest and most heavily indebted countries.

The Paris Club, formed in 1956, is an informal group of creditor governments from large industrialised countries.

The state is a hub for investment in “cleantech”, which could be at risk with any policy change, and has a governor and senior congressional representatives who have led President Obama’s push for a US climate change law.

The face-off to replace Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in November offers a clear choice on the issue, which for many will come down to whether laws on climate change help the state lead in new ‘green’ industries or drive firms out of business or out of state in reaction to higher costs.

“It’s a pivotal race, certainly for California, but for the rest of the country” too, said incoming Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, echoing the thoughts of many businesses in the US state with the largest population and economy.

Former eBay chief Meg Whitman and Silicon Valley colleague Steve Poizner, the Republicans vying for the job, both would put the 2006 landmark air pollution law on hold. State Attorney General Jerry Brown, the unofficial Democratic candidate, would defend it.

California’s 2006 law begins the experiment of creating a market to price carbon, putting a cap on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and letting polluters trade emission permits. It sets new building, automobile and planning rules for efficiency and embraces alternative energy.

An initiative which has just begun gathering signatures to get on the November ballot would suspend the law until the state’s double-digit unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent or less – which economists say will be years – and has won Poizner’s support.

Whitman, ahead in Republican polls, aims to put key provisions of the law on hold for a year for study.

Brown, a former California governor who supports the law, led Whitman in a January Field Poll by 10 percentage points – half his lead in an October poll.

Overreaching regulation or grounds for growth
“Colorado, Utah, Texas, they are competing for our jobs,” Whitman said recently. She believes “overreaching environmental regulations” are part of the problem, although she supports a target for the state to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, arguing it will create jobs.

Poizner in a statement said the climate change law “sent a message to every business and every manufacturer that it’s going to cost you more to do business in … California.”

As attorney general, Brown sued the federal government to force it to regulate greenhouse gases, saying on his website, “I am committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that California meets its greenhouse gas reduction targets.”

The prospect of leaving the 33 percent renewable energy target in place and suspending the broader law is sure to create controversy. Companies focused on cleantech, the catchall phrase for technology related to the push to cut greenhouse gases, want both.

Matt Golden, president of building efficiency start-up Recurve, says putting a price on carbon, as the 2006 law will do, is the key to leveling the playing field with dirtier power, and suspending the law would set back the state.

“You throw all this risk into the equation and venture capital firms are banking on us building this new order, this new market. If you stop this evolution, it is going to be a hell of a lot less bankable,” he said.

And if California puts its law on hold, the chance of a federal move drops close to zero, he argues.

“I think it might put a nail in the coffin of climate change nationally,” he said.

Field Polls show that voters in the state, which has double-digit inflation and faces a new budget gap – are dissatisfied with legislators and think the state is headed in the wrong direction.

But in a January poll for a non-profit, Field found nearly 70 percent agreed that California could cut greenhouse gases and expand jobs at the same time, and only 12 percent in a separate question said that recent changes to encourage clean energy would take away jobs.

By a vote of 70 to 28, the Senate approved the bill and sent it on to
the House of Representatives, which could approve the measure quickly
for President Barack Obama to sign into law.

The House has already passed a substantially different $155bn jobs
bill, but observers say it is likely to take up the Senate version to
ensure that a highway-construction fund is not disrupted.

“The Senate has an ability to drive this process,” said Peter Peyser, who lobbies for state and local governments.

The bill includes a $13bn payroll tax break for businesses that hire
unemployed workers, along with subsidies for state and local
construction bonds.

It also extends the highway-construction fund through the end of the year.

The bill’s costs are offset by a crackdown on offshore tax shelters.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he expects to take up a second
jobs bill that could extend unemployment benefits, renew an expired
research-and-development tax break, and provide money to cash-strapped
states.

Amboseli’s zebra and wildebeest population has been decimated by drought and the park’s carnivores are now roaming far and wide in search of food, killing cows, donkeys and goats tended by Maasai pastoralists.

The herders have also lost a significant chunk of their livestock during the prolonged dry spell and now some are killing lions to stop their precious herds dwindling further.

To try and stem the near-daily attacks and temper the anger in surrounding villages, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is moving 7,000 herbivores – 4,000 zebras and 3,000 wildebeest – to the park’s expansive plains in Southern Kenya near the Tanzanian border in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

“The attacks are occurring almost every day, especially in the evening,” said George Osuri, senior warden of Amboseli National Park. “Almost every night we will get a report of depredation and basically it involves lions and hyenas.”

“The communities are very emotional. They lost a significant number of their livestock, therefore, whatever little that was left is guarded jealously,” he said after an awareness meeting with Maasai community leaders outside the park.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been more than 50 attacks and two lions have been killed. In three night-time raids this week, lions killed four cows, two goats and a donkey.

Charles Musyoki, a senior scientist at KWS, said Kenya’s lion population has dwindled to just 2,000 from 2,700 in 2002.

“We are really very concerned about the national status of lions and we want to see them conserved in the best way possible, but the lions then happen also to be a problem animal,” he told reporters. “So striking a balance between these two is a bit tricky.”

Meals on wheels
The zebras’ journey started some 450 km (280 miles) further north in the 44,000-acre Soysambu Conservancy and ranch, privately owned by aristocrat Tom Cholmondeley, grandson of Lord Delamere, Kenya’s most famous white settler.

A KWS helicopter acts as a 21st century sheepdog: hovering, dipping and weaving above grasslands dotted with acacia trees, driving the zebras towards a plastic-walled enclosure.

A few beasts flit through the scrub, then more appear stampeding towards the enclosure. KWS staff quickly pull plastic screens across to close the entrance and gradually funnel the panicked zebras towards a truck.

KWS often translocates animals to redress imbalances caused by drought and poaching, both to preserve the country’s delicate ecosystems and ensure wildlife parks remain a draw for tourists.

This time last year, Amboseli was teeming with wildebeest and zebras and five years ago there were 7,000. Now, there are just a handful and vast herds of elephants are the main attraction.

“Apart from trying to create that balance for the carnivores to have food, we also want to improve the aesthetic value of the whole ecosystem because we realise that for tourism purposes it will be very difficult for visitors to come here and see nothing,” said Osuri.

Despite the global slowdown, Kenya remains a popular long-haul tourist destination thanks to its abundant wildlife and pristine Indian Ocean beaches. Tourism is the third biggest source of foreign exchange for the region’s largest economy.

Human/carnivore conflict
But the translocation will take time. At the beginning of February, 49 zebras were moved with another 88 making the journey in three trucks shuttling between the parks – and the Maasai are becoming impatient.

Across Kenya, the tension between pastoralists and wildlife parks is palpable. Battling over scarce resources, exacerbated by years of failed rains, some herders warn there will be a war unless a solution is found soon.

Recognising the looming crisis, KWS is holding awareness meetings to explain what it is doing, and why. Gathered in the cool shadow of a thorn tree outside Amboseli, Maasai herders and chiefs explain their grievances to Osuri.

James Likampa, chief of the Oltiasika area, says angry farmers are considering poisoning the hyenas as they are harder to kill with spears than lions. Others also complain the new zebras will destroy crops and the wildebeest will bring disease.

“It would be better to translocate the hyenas to somewhere with herbivores,” he tells the meeting.

Likampa says it would be good if KWS provided wire fencing so they could secure their animal enclosures without cutting down more trees, but acknowledges that the delivery of more herbivores to Amboseli can reduce the conflict.

Osuri rejects requests to fence in the lions, saying that Amboseli would then just become another “big zoo”. But the park will carry out a census of the burgeoning hyena population next month and look at options if the ecosystem cannot support them.

Standing next to an enclosure where he and his sons fought off a lion, Daniel ole Kutata says if they get proper fencing and more zebras and wildebeest come to the Amboseli, the situation should improve.

“But if what’s happening at the moment continues, the future is bleak for the Maasai.”

Who has the world’s biggest economy? A) The US B) China/Asia C) Europe? Who has the most Fortune 500 companies? A) The US B) China C) Europe. Who attracts most US investment? A) Europe B) China C) Asia.

The correct answer in each case is Europe, short for the 27-member EU, a region with 500 million citizens. They produce an economy almost as large as the US and China combined but have, so far, largely failed to make much of a dent in American perceptions that theirs is a collection of cradle-to-grave nanny states doomed to be left behind in a 21st century that will belong to China.

That China will rise to be a superpower in this century, overtaking the US in terms of GDP by 2035, is becoming conventional wisdom. But those who subscribe to that theory might do well to remember the fate of similar long-range forecasts in the past. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, eminent strategists predicted that Argentina would be a world power within 20 years. In the late 1980s, Japan was seen as the next global leader.

The latest pessimistic utterances about Europe were sparked by a debt crisis in Greece which raised concern over the health of the euro, the common currency of 16 EU members. Plus President Obama’s decision to stay away from a US-EU summit scheduled for May in Madrid, with a new EU leadership structure that should have made it easier to answer then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous question: “Who do I call when I want to talk to Europe?”

There are still several numbers to call in the complex set-up, giving fresh reasons to fret to those crystal-gazers who see the future dominated by the US and China, the so-called G-2.

Pundits who see the European way of doing things as a model for the US (and others) to follow are few and far between, not least, says one of them, Steven Hill, because most Americans are blissfully unaware of European achievements and, as he puts it, “reluctant to look elsewhere because ‘we are the best.'”

As foreigners travelling through the US occasionally note, the phrases “we are the best” and “America is No 1” are often uttered with deep conviction by citizens who have never set foot outside their country and therefore lack a direct way of comparison. (They are in the majority: only one in five Americans has a passport).

Hill, who heads the political reform programme at the New American Foundation, a liberal Washington think tank, has just published a book whose title alone is enough to irk conservative Americans: Europe’s Promise. Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Future.

Stubborn preconceptions

It marshals an impressive army of facts and comparative statistics to show that the US is behind Europe in nearly every socio-economic category that can be measured and that neither America’s trickle-down, Wall Street-driven capitalism nor China’s state capitalism hold the keys to the future.

While China’s growth has been impressive, says Hill, the country remains, in essence, a sub-contractor to the West and is racked by internal contradictions.

“When I talk to American audiences,” Hill said in an interview, “many find the figures I cite hard to believe. They haven’t heard them before. US businesses making more profits in Europe than anywhere else, 20 times more than in China? 179 of the world’s top companies are European compared with 140 American? That does not fit the preconceptions.”

Such preconceptions exist, in part, because US media have portrayed Europe as a region in perpetual crisis, its economies sclerotic, its taxes a disincentive to personal initiative, its standards of living lower than America’s, its universal health care, guaranteed pensions, long vacations and considerably shorter working hours a recipe for low growth and stagnation. “In the transmission of news across the Atlantic, myth has been substituted for reality,” says Hill.

He is in good, though numerically small, company with such views. The economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel prize winners, also have positive outlooks for Europe. In a recent column in the New York Times, Krugman said that Europe is often held up as evidence that higher taxes for the rich and benefits for the less well-off kill economic progress. Not so, he argued. The European experience demonstrates the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

The relative rankings of countries tend to be defined by GDP per capita but Hill points out that this might not be the best yardstick because it does not differentiate between transactions that add to the well-being of a country and those that diminish it. A dollar spent on sending a teenager to prison adds as much to GDP as a dollar spent on sending him to college.

On a long list of quality-of-life indexes that measure things beyond the GDP yardstick – from income inequality and access to health care to life expectancy, infant mortality and poverty levels – the US does not rank near the top.

So where is the best place to live? For the past 30 years, a US-based magazine, International Living, has compiled a quality-of-life index based on cost of living, culture and leisure, economy, environment, freedom, health, infrastructure, safety and climate. France tops the list for the fifth year running. The US comes in 7th.