The drug war in Mexico is going so horribly wrong that the State Department is warning Americans who may be thinking about traveling there:

Travel Alert

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of Consular Affairs

This information is current as of today, document.write(Date()+".") Fri Oct 10 2008 19:36:27 GMT-0400 (EDT).

Mexico

April 14, 2008

This Travel Alert updates information for U.S. citizens on security situations in Mexico that may affect their activities while in that country.  This supersedes the Travel Alert for Mexico dated October 24, 2007, and expires on October 15, 2008.

Violence Along The U.S.-Mexico Border
-------------------------------------

Violent criminal activity fueled by a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade continues along the U.S.-Mexico border.  Attacks are aimed primarily at members of drug trafficking organizations, Mexican police forces, criminal justice officials, and journalists.  However, foreign visitors and residents, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region.  In its effort to combat violence, the government of Mexico has deployed military troops in various parts of the country.  U.S. citizens are urged to cooperate with official checkpoints when traveling on Mexican highways.

What a disaster. If there were anything remotely effective about the war on drugs, don’t you think that trying this policy for several decades would have produced a better outcome than this? I mean, look at it. Seriously, just watch what’s happening. Is this the result you’d get from a drug policy that worked?

Ever since President Calderon took office a year and a half ago and began trying to crack down on drug trafficking, everything has gone to hell. It gets worse everyday because using war to attack the drug supply is a terrible policy that destroys everything except the drug supply. What other conclusion could you possibly reach given what’s taking place right before our eyes?

Has drug war destabilization in South America become a threat to our national security?

MIAMI (AP) — There is real danger that Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaida and Hezbollah could form alliances with wealthy and powerful Latin American drug lords to launch new terrorist attacks, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Extremist group operatives have already been identified in several Latin American countries, mostly involved in fundraising and finding logistical support. But Charles Allen, chief of intelligence analysis at the Homeland Security Department, said they could use well-established smuggling routes and drug profits to bring people or even weapons of mass destruction to the U.S.

Well that just sucks. Realistically, however, I think we’re relying on a rather twisted interpretation of the drug traffickers’ agenda here. These guys are making huge profits and they don’t want to rock the boat. Terrorists might pay for cover upfront, but they’re bad for business in the long term. I doubt high-level traffickers would deliberately abate straight-up terrorists whose goal is basically to kill their customers. They bring a different kind of attention that you seriously don’t want if you’re just moving a product.

Still, it’s certainly true that the massive blackmarket infrastructure has led to the development of invisible networks and services that terrorists could take advantage of. If you’re selling underground transit, you don’t ask too many questions of your customers. It’s not willful collaboration we should be worried about, so much as the reality that there’s an industry built around bringing anyone and anything into our country.

After decades of drug war demolition tactics throughout South and Central America, the situation is worse than ever. As new threats emerge, the drug war continues to literally puncture every mechanism that might protect us.

Rumors that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai may be involved in drug trafficking have not been investigated. Why?

The assertions about the involvement of the president’s brother in the incidents were never investigated, according to American and Afghan officials, even though allegations that he has benefited from narcotics trafficking have circulated widely in Afghanistan.
…
Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter. But White House officials dispute that, instead citing limited D.E.A. resources in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects as the reasons for the lack of an inquiry. [NYT]

The whole thing reeks and this "limited resources" excuse sounds dubious at best. Ahmed Wali Karzai is chief of the Kandahar Provincial Council. If he’s a drug trafficker, that’s kind of a big deal, isn’t it? Our inability/unwillingness to even explore such a possibility just shows once again that our supply reduction efforts in Afghanistan are a total joke.

The battle over harm reduction in Vancouver just gets uglier all the time:

VANCOUVER -  The Pivot Legal Society has asked federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser to examine whether the RCMP exceeded its law-enforcement mandate by commissioning studies into Vancouver's supervised injection site.

Pivot lawyer and spokesman Doug King on Wednesday revealed RCMP e-mails indicating the national police force commissioned reports researching Insite.

"The RCMP Act gave the RCMP a mandate to act as peace officers for the citizens of Canada. Using public funds entrusted to them to fund a cynical critique of health-based research clearly does not fall within this mandate," King said. [Vancouver Sun]

Indeed, police are responsible for enforcing the law, not shaping social policy. Law enforcement’s backhanded attempt at inserting itself into the academic debate over harm reduction is completely inappropriate and disturbing. Does anyone believe that police-sponsored research will ever reach conclusions other than the need for more police power?

RCMP now claims that it conducts research all the time, which may be true, but misses the point. Police research should focus on measuring the effectiveness of their own programs, not producing political ammunition against non-police programs that police don’t like.

As public attitudes surrounding the war on drugs continue to evolve, we’ll begin to see more of this type of thing:

Containing parts of Kirkland, Redmond, Woodinville, and points east, the 45th Legislative District is hardly a hotbed of radicalism. But the two candidates for one of the district's two House seats share a position well out of the political mainstream: They both advocate wholesale changes to the War on Drugs.

In his time away from the capital, incumbent State Rep. Roger Goodman (D-Kirkland) heads the King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project, where he works on moving drug policy's focus from crime and punishment to public health. His challenger, Toby Nixon (R-Kirkland), who held the seat from 2002 to 2006 before leaving to run for the state Senate (he lost his bid for an open seat to Eric Oemig), has spoken out in defense of Washington's medical marijuana law and pushed a bill requiring performance audits of drug-enforcement policies. [Seattle Weekly]

So will the candidates start arguing over who’s going to do more to end the drug war?

Noting that "some have observed that it's unfortunate that we're running against each other," Nixon adds that he's not sure he and Goodman have any disagreements on drug policy reform. But he wishes Goodman had followed his lead and pushed more drug policy reform bills as a legislator.

There you have it folks! The first candidate for public office to ever get called out for not trying hard enough to reform drug policy. This is not a coincidence, this is a sign of the times. It won’t be over tomorrow -- we’d be foolish to think that -- but we are entering a phase where we’ll begin to see and hear the drug policy debate in new forums. Once reform enters the mainstream political curriculum, the tone changes, the pot jokes start sounding immature and the things that actually matter can finally be discussed.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

Here’s another completely odd phenomenon discovered in the laboratory of drug prohibition:

It's a mystery that has got British law enforcement officials and others across the planet scratching their heads. Put bluntly, enough heroin to supply the world's demand for years has simply disappeared.
…
For the past three years, production has been running at almost twice the level of global demand. The numbers just don't add up. [BBC]

Get it? Afghanistan is producing far more heroin than the entire world even uses. So where the hell did it go?

The answer is easy. It’s in a massive underground refrigerator. Seriously, that’s exactly where it is. These guys are storing enough heroin to survive a nuclear holocaust. If we killed every poppy plant on the planet tomorrow, they wouldn’t run out for years. These heroin barons aren’t the nicest people and we’re making them rich with our silly drug war. Anyone who still thinks flamethrowers and helicopter patrols are going to solve the heroin problem needs to chill for a minute and think about what’s happening here.

Try reading this unhinged Boston Globe editorial opposing decriminalization in Massachusetts with a straight face. It is an exhibit in dishonesty and an insult to everything on earth that is actually truly dangerous. The whole thing is nuts, but this line really tickled my bullshit bone:

And despite their best efforts to paint an ounce of marijuana as innocuous, the fact is that one ounce of marijuana is worth about $600 and represents about 60 individual sales.

Seriously!? Do you even know what marijuana is? The average price is around $200 an ounce. And it's not sold in 1/60th ounce increments. You can’t even roll a joint out of that. You know what a joint is, right? Seriously, I would have thought there were enough preposterous reefer madness arguments already in circulation that you wouldn’t need to create new ones.

One of the great challenges facing those who advocate sensible marijuana policies is that of responding to crazy made-up nonsense over and over again. Sometimes our opponents just lie on purpose. Other times they simply don't know what they're talking about. And frequently we can't tell the difference.

A couple weeks ago, I noted the contradiction between Obama's call for reduced incarceration of first-time nonviolent drug offenders and his support for the heinous Byrne Grant program that has filled our prisons with petty offenders and subsidized mindblowing episodes of racist drug war excess.

These completing agendas in Obama’s crime platform deserve more discussion, thus Radley Balko has a piece at Slate that digs into this.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

We covered this in The Drug War Chronicle, but I think it needs more discussion:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President Felipe Calderon, locked in a bloody battle with drug cartels, wants to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of street drugs in a plan likely to irk Washington.

Calderon, a conservative in power nearly two years, sent a proposal to Congress on Thursday that would scrap the penalties for drugs including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, opium and marijuana.
…
Under Calderon's plan, people carrying up to 2 grams (0.07 ounces) of marijuana or opium, half a gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin or 40 milligrams of methamphetamine would face no criminal charges.

Where shall I begin?

1. President Calderon himself has endorsed this. He is the golden boy of the U.S.-subsidized Mexican drug war and after accepting our financial support, he now does something certain to enrage the American Drug Czar.

2. Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, tried the same thing and backed down due to pressure from Washington, D.C. Now that Calderon has established his drug war credentials, he’s picking up where Fox left off. Obviously, Mexico intends to decriminalize simple possession and won’t stop until it is done.

3. The timing of this move appears designed to circumvent negative attention from Washington, D.C., which is horribly distracted right now for obvious reasons. I’ve been unable to find a response from the Drug Czar or anyone else. Amazing.

Mexico is plagued by drug trade violence, the likes of which we’ve never seen within our borders, and its political leadership is calling for an end to petty drug arrests. It won’t end the bloodshed – not even close – but it is a dramatic shift away from the U.S. drug war mentality that we must continuously pursue and arrest drug users in order to "win" the war on drugs. This is remarkable to say the least.

Check out this interesting logic from the FDA:

WASHINGTON - A top government health official rejected the idea of an immediate ban on cough and cold medicines for young children, saying it might cause unintended harm.

Food and Drug Administration officials at a public hearing Thursday said they need to gather more data on whether over-the-counter remedies are safe and effective for children ages 2 to 6.

The FDA is also worried that a ban — as sought by leading pediatricians' groups — might only drive parents to give adult medicines to their youngsters. [MSNBC]

Well, that sounds like a logical concern. People tend to make safer choices when available and more dangerous ones when their options are restricted. Yet federal law still blocks funding for needle exchange and criminalizes people who use marijuana as an alternative to powerful opioid-based pharmaceuticals.

                                                                                                                                                                              {Thanks, Caryn]