Three Greek police officers taking part in a raid on a hashish plantation were ambushed and shot by suspected growers armed with AK-47s Sunday night, leaving one officer in critical condition with

The Taliban made about $100 million last year by taxing Afghan farmers involved in growing opium poppies, Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) told

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Like the rest of inner city America, Bridgeport, Connecticut's 130th District has for decades been ground zero in the war on drugs.

Three months after Mexican President Felipe Calderón sent thousands of troops into Ciudad Juárez and other Chihuahua cities and towns to fight drug traffickers in Operation Chihuahua Together, th

In an annual report released Wednesday, Coca Cultivation in the Andean Region, the UN Office on Dr

Two recent incidents involving SWAT teams are adding fuel to the fire in the emerging controversy over the routine use of such paramilitarized police units to prosecute the drug war.

The US Congress Joint Economic Committee yesterday held a historic hearing on the economic costs of US drug policy.

Reuters offers a dismal assessment of the Mexican drug war entitled "ANALYSIS-Mexico's Calderon bogged down in bloody drugs war". I'm left wondering, of course, why it is that one is said to be "analyzing" when pointing out that the drug war is failing. Must we place Mexico under the microscope in order to observe that there's a "bloody drugs war" going on there? Isn't that just a fact?

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a bold $7 billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

Perhaps one technically engages in analysis when suggesting that the odds of winning are stacked against Calderon, but we don't really need some credentialed academic to tell us that, do we? Has anyone ever won a drug war?

Afghan police found and destroyed a whopping 260 tons of hashish near Spin Boldak in Kandahar province near the Pakistan border Monday.

Eight years ago, voters in Northern California's Mendocino County passed the groundbreaking Measure G, which allowed people to grow up to 25 marijuana plants for medical or personal use and directe

The US House of Representatives Tuesday approved a $1.6 billion, three-year anti-drug assistance plan aimed at helping Mexico and Central American countries fight the region's powerful drug traffic

Just last week, the NY Times delivered a dismal assessment of drug war progress in Mexico. Now its editorial board proposes that we spend billions in U.S. tax dollars funding the proven failure that is Mexico's war on drugs:

The timid assistance package proposed by the Bush administration and pared down by Congress suggests that Washington doesn’t grasp either the scale of the danger or its own responsibilities.
…

The Bush administration is right to acknowledge the shared threat and the common responsibility. But the three-year, $1.4 billion aid package it proposed doesn’t do the job. It is too small, notably so when compared with the billions the cartels earn in the United States.

The whole editorial all but refutes itself, observing that nothing is working, then calling for substantial investments in the same tactics that have produced only dramatic violence.

It really is amazing to think that the editors of one of our top newspapers have no concept of the social, economic, and historical dimensions of the war on drugs. What examples could they possibly be relying upon to conclude that larger investments are the key to drug war victory?

If the NYT thinks $1.4 billion isn't enough, then they should tell us how much they'd like to spend. Seriously. How much will it cost to win? How would you define success? If we buy a whole entire drug war for the Mexican government, will it be modeled after ours? If so, are you insane?

I'm so damned tired of being told that the drug war would work if we spent more and fought harder. How much are we really willing to sacrifice in order to prove how false that is?

It seems Mexican President Felipe Calderon's aggressive drug war tactics are impressing American politicians more than his own people:

A majority of Mexicans believe violent drug gangs are winning a war with President Felipe Calderon's government after one of the worst months on record for killings, Reforma newspaper reported on Sunday.

According to a poll by the newspaper, 53 percent of Mexicans think that drug traffickers hold the upper hand against government forces which are trying to clamp down on cartels that ship drugs to the United States.

Only 24 percent said they believed the government was winning the battle. The remaining 23 percent gave no opinion. [Reuters]

Since Calderon took office and promised a crackdown on drug trafficking, there have been over 4,000 drug war killings in Mexico. Mexicans must live amidst horrific and growing violence, with no end in sight, just so Calderon can stand proudly atop the drug war podium. Of course, he can only do so figuratively, for fear of being gunned down like his highest-ranking police officials.

Really, the question of who's winning the drug war shouldn't even have to be asked. Of course the cartels are winning, because there wouldn’t be cartels without the drug war. Every dollar they make, every bride they pay, every assassin's bullet is a product of drug prohibition's bloodstained legacy. The problem with the drug war isn’t that we aren’t trying hard enough, it's that trying hard is actually where all the worst violence and disorder comes from.

Nowhere is the failure of drug prohibition more obvious than in Mexico, where President Calderon's crackdown has already produced over 4,000 deaths, without making a dent in the drug trade.

Yet Obama now joins John McCain in praising Mexico's brutal and ineffective anti-drug efforts:

Mexican drug cartels are terrorizing cities and towns. President Calderon was right to say that enough is enough. We must support Mexico’s effort to crack down. [suntimes.com]

I don't know how anyone can look at the dismal state of the Mexican drug war and find anything to be proud of. Still, I agree with Pete Guither who responded to Obama's comments by pointing out that we just can't expect a realistic drug policy platform from the major party candidates. They're not there yet.

Obama's good positions on needle exchange, medical marijuana, and sentencing have drawn interest from reformers, but there's simply no way to paint his praise of Mexico's bloody drug war crusade as anything other than typical prohibitionist "troop surge" rhetoric. It's the opposite of what's needed and it should give us pause before endorsing the popular perception among reformers that Obama "gets" the drug war issue.

When describing his plans to fund drug war activity in Central and South America, Obama says "we'll tie our support to clear benchmarks for drug seizures, corruption prosecutions, crime reduction, and kingpins busted," demonstrating a fundamental failure to grasp how those activities complement one another. Crime and violence will simply increase if enforcement increases, so any set of benchmarks will ultimately have to ignore one category or the other.

In regards to both Obama and McCain, however, we've got to recognize that ending violence in the international drug trade is the final stage of drug policy reform. It's the very last issue we'll have to confront and the last one about which we're likely to hear interesting or forward-thinking proposals from prominent politicians. There's no middle ground here. When we're ready to end violence and corruption in the drug trade, we'll stop waging the drug war.

(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.)

As of last Friday, the death toll in the prohibition-related violence wracking Mexico this year had climbed to 1,378, up sharply from the 940 dead at this time last year,

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Radley Balko has much more information from Ryan Frederick's preliminary hearing, which I mentioned yesterday.

Of particular interest is the fact that special prosecutor Paul Ebert has threatened to file felony drug charges against Frederick, despite the fact that only a tiny amount of marijuana was recovered in the raid. The suspected marijuana grow that prompted the raid simply didn’t exist, so any new drug charges at this point are almost certainly a trumped-up character assassination designed to smear Frederick in front of the jury.

It's a critical move for Ebert, who clearly realizes that it will be hard to explain why Frederick would have shot a cop over a few flakes of pot. Unless Frederick can be painted as a hardened criminal, his persistent claim that he thought the police were burglars would likely prevail.

It is just amazing the amount of effort being put into prosecuting an innocent man for a murder that wasn't his fault, all so that the real killer (the drug war) can remain on the loose.

The debate should be over now. All you have to do is look south to learn that the drug war is worse than a failure; it causes massive violence, corruption, and death. From The New York Times:

"When the commander, Commissioner Édgar Millán Gómez, the acting chief of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8, it sent chills through a force that had increasingly found itself a target."

"Top security officials who were once thought untouchable have been gunned down in Mexico City, four in the last month alone."

"Drug dealers killed another seven federal agents this year in retaliation for drug busts in border towns."

"Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as well, among them at least a score of municipal police commanders, since Mr. Calderón took office."

"The violence between drug cartels that Mr. Calderón has sought to end has only worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say. All told, 4,125 people have been killed in drug violence since Mr. Calderón took office."

"Several terrified local police chiefs have resigned, the most recent being Guillermo Prieto, the chief in Ciudad Juárez, who stepped down last week after his second in command was killed a few days earlier."

So what does Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who instigated the massive increase in drug war violence, have to say about all this?

The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence among gangs and attacks on the police as a sign of success rather than failure.

Wow. Well, I guess you've got it all figured then, Mr. President. That's good to hear, because for a second there, it sounded like everything was going to hell.

Radley Balko reports:

He was formally charged with first degree murder and with the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. So yeah. They really are going to go through with this.

The misdemeanor marijuana possession charge was nolle prossed. Which means the reason the police tried to ram their way into Frederick’s house in the first place is now pretty much moot. They didn’t even find enough marijuana to merit a charge. Now they’re trying to make him pay for the consequences of their mistake.

So to recap, police charged into Ryan Frederick's home looking for a marijuana grow that didn’t exist. Mistaking the intruders for thieves, Ryan opened fire, killing a police officer. He's now charged with knowingly and deliberately killing a cop, even though that's the least plausible explanation for his actions.

Italy's Calabrian mob syndicate, the 'Ndrangheta, has now displaced the Sicilian Mafia as Europe's most powerful gangsters, thanks largely to the 'Ndrangheta's domination of cocaine trafficking on

Appearing in London at an event aimed at undermining cocaine consumption in Great Britain, Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos Calderón appeared to suggest that discussions about cocaine pol