MONTREAL--Disgraced former media baron Conrad Black, released from jail this month on a two-million-dollar bond, lashed out at the US justice system Saturday in a column written for Toronto's National Post.

"In my 28 months as a guest of the US government, I often wondered how my time in that role would end. I never expected that I would have to serve the whole term, though I was, and am, psychologically prepared to do so," he wrote in the piece that discussed his final hours behind bars.

"Now that I have learned more of the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years," he wrote.

In his last day before heading home to his luxury compound in Palm Beach, Florida, Black said fellow prisoners from all walks of life came to his cell to make their farewells.

"The rehabilitated and unregenerate, the innocent and the guilty, and in almost all cases the grossly over-sentenced, streamed in steadily for hours," he wrote.

Black also spoke of seeing "the failure of the US War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offenses, although 42 percent of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California)."

A trillion dollars, he noted, have been spent on the effort by US authorities, but the only result has been illegal substances in question being "more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war."

Black must remain in the United States after his release until he provides more details of his financial assets, a judge said earlier this month.

The former baron wants to return to Canada, where he was born, but must remain in the United States for now and is scheduled on August 16 for a hearing to provide additional financial details.

The 65-year-old had served more than two years of a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence. He is appealing his fraud conviction on the basis of a Supreme Court ruling in his favor last month.

Black once ran the world's third largest media empire with such titles as Britain's Daily Telegraph and the Chicago Sun-Times.

But he was forced to quit as head of the Hollinger holding company when he was charged with siphoning off millions of dollars from the firm, notably when it began divesting its Canadian and US publications in 2000.

Black and his associates were convicted of stealing 3.5 million dollars by awarding themselves tax-free bonuses from the newspaper sell-offs, without the approval of Hollinger's board. They were accused of skimming off some 60 million dollars in all between 1999 and 2001.