Brazil's New Drug Law

Some people say that Moses was the first drug policy reformer... that he went up the mountain and consulted a "burning bush" (wink, nod), came back down with stone tablets and everybody said "Moses! Moses! How did ya do?"

And Moses said, "well, I got it down to ten but he still wants adultery in there."

But, ah, I digress...

One of our copublishers here, Charles Faris, participates in a very interesting group blog called the Charles Baudelaire blog. Some weeks back he published a very revealing set of emails regarding the libel against Brazilian drug policy reform leader Fabio Mesquita.

It was, in fact, the need to correct all the disinformation spread in those days by some U.S. activists that led me to ask Karine Mueller to write the excellent story published today on Narco News with the true facts about Brazil's New Drug Law.

Anyway, Charles has just succeeded in shining even more sunlight on the libeling organization, DRCNet of Washington, DC, which, when it so often gets a story about Latin America wrong, doesn't offer honest corrections, and when it sometimes gets a story right, as revealed this week on Charles' blog, it steals the translations and doesn't credit we proles in the working class that did all the heavy lifting to bring those stories to the English-speaking world.

Charles caught them in the act of ripping off not one, not two, but three Narco News translations last week, without crediting the source.

(That's pretty hilarious on a number of counts, especially since David Borden, the imploding director of that organization, wrote to Faris, weeks ago, "I urge you not to rely on Narco News for accurate news reporting or for rational perspectives on other organizations or activists." Meanwhile, Borden obviously doesn't even believe his own bullshit because just last week, he stole three of our reports and original translations without crediting us.

Apparently, our reports are, indeed, credible and coveted enough to be plagiarized even as Dave Borden and Phil Smith flail around doing their best Gerard Latortue imitations when caught in yet another act of illegitimacy, dishonesty, and violation of the most basic journalistic ethics: the need to credit the source.

There's a reason they don't credit sources (I'm hardly the only victim of this: they do it to everyone.) They want their readers to have a false impression that they do the work, so they can then ask the readers to pay their salaries. It is theft, followed by deceit about that theft, pure and simple. It is most of what they do.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Borden's most recent email implosions, published on Charles' blog, is the seething paranoia he displays in response to Charles' very polite questions (I must say, Charles is very talented at getting folks to reveal their essential characters by playing it fair and straight himself):

"In a functional scenario, the translator who believed he did not get due credit would write to the publisher and say something like the following: "You may or may not be aware that Narco News was the source of the translations of the Latin American news outlets' 2001 stories referenced in this week's This Week in History section of the Drug War Chronicle. Could you add a note to that effect on the web site, and perhaps include a note in next week's issue?" The translator might add, if he cared to, "It's important not to forget the translators when referencing passages, not just the original news outlet." Then, the publisher could consider the request and take any appropriate actions.

"Instead, Al Giordano publicly attacks us for it, does not write us about it, and the first we hear about his complaint is from you."

In fact, I didn't attack them publicly for it. The matter has never been mentioned before now on Narco News, nor on The Narcosphere, nor on my BigLeftOutside blog. But that passage above offers an interesting glimpse into the mentality of these serial plagiarists.

In fact, last year I did write to Borden and Smith about previous thefts of our translations and work (about half of what they ever publish on Latin America, and the only times they get the story right, comes when they steal from Narco News). They didn't issue any correction then either. In fact, Borden, a year ago, right after I asked for a financial accounting of $88,000 supposedly spent by his organization on last year's drug legalization summit in Merida (of which, as a member of the steering committee for that event, I can't find an accounting for $30,000 dollars of it, or any evidence that it was spent on the conference), threw a tantrum that included a demand that I never contact him again and a claim that he had blocked all my email addresses from his mailbox.

Now he's telling Faris that I should have written him? If he's blocked emails from me, how would he know if I have or have not? In any case, his paranoid raving that "Al Giordano publicly attacks us for it, does not write us about it, and the first we hear about his complaint is from you," is pure fantasy. This is only the third time I've offered a critique of his unethical activity in public, only the second time on Narco News (the last time was to defend the good name of Fabio Mesquita from the Borden-Smith libel squad), and it comes after, not before, his frothing at the mouth hallucination that, if some reader somewhere also notices his plagiarism, that therefore Big Bad Al must have "publicly attacked" him over it.

Well, I didn't. But now that yet another false claim by these Beltway Bandits is published on the Internet, and they can't seem to grasp the essence of the matter, I'll simply quote that early drug policy reformer from Mount Sinai, who had a newsletter carved in stone: "Thou Shalt Not Steal."

Instead of flailing around with paranoid fantasies, they should do what ethical people do: Issue a correction, learn from their mistakes, and move on.