By Denise Tessier

This past month, more than 1,000 people from nearly every state in the union and a number of foreign countries gathered– in Albuquerque — for a conference devoted to reforming American drug use policy.

Did the Albuquerque Journal give it – as I asked in a previous post – the coverage it deserved?

Technically, it left the heavy lifting to the Associated Press – specifically, Sue Major Holmes, whose enterprising dispatch was run by the Journal the morning the International Drug Policy Reform Conference was to start. It was an excellent advance story that led with a quote from a former undercover officer — now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition — and provided an overview of the upcoming conference and various groups and individuals who would be gathering to question drug policy.

Holmes’ advance was followed in the paper the next day (which doesn’t appear to have been posted online, so no link here) with reportage  from Journal reporter Rozanna M. Martinez, who attended a candlelight vigil held on Civic Plaza to honor those incarcerated or affected by the war on drugs. But it doesn’t look like she was given time to cover the conference itself.

Actual conference coverage is nowhere to be found.

Martinez’s story, which ran Nov. 13, referred to the conference’s opening day with a single sentence:

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson teamed up Tuesday with former U.S. Marshal Matthew Fogg to speak about how incarceration is not the solution to the drug problem.

The story also said Johnson would speak on the conference’s closing day.

That’s pretty much it. No reportage from three days of workshops and plenary sessions. Nothing on Gov. Bill Richardson’s opening remarks. Nothing on what former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge Castaneda might have said. (He was scheduled to appear at one of the major sessions.)

And nothing on the closing speech by Johnson, who during his term as New Mexico governor commissioned a special task force to look at the efficacy of drug laws. (And who, by the way, has become vastly more convincing as a drug reform advocate since then; check out the video interview by Peter St. Cyr on Heath Haussamen’s NMPolitics.net site .

To be fair, the Journal did run online on its Newsseeker site an advance about the candlelight vigil, which linked to the AP story and also linked to the conference Web site.

But it’s obvious the conference was not a priority for the Journal. It advanced the conference, then left readers with nothing on what actually transpired.