ONDCP would like to thank all of the loyal readers of Pushing Back for helping make this blog a success. Thanks in part to you, we are now averaging over 300,000 hits per month!
Note the use of the word "hits." It may be technically true that Pushing Back is getting 300,000 hits per month, if you use server terminology. In that case, every call of the server counts as a hit, so as a single page is loading it could call upon the server dozens or hundreds of times to load images, run scripts, etc. "Hits" may be useful for analyzing the way you organize your site to reduce server overload, but means very little in terms of the number of people who come to read your site.
As two helicopters circled overhead, dozens of troops with assault rifles and riot shields converged on a police headquarters to inspect weapons, a first step in probing alleged drug gang links and corruption inside the local force.The move comes only three weeks since Calderon sent 7,000 troops to his own home state of Michoacan. 2,000 people were killed in drug trade violence in Mexico last year. One of the guests at DRCNet's 2003 conference in Mexico, "Out from the Shadows, Ending Drug Prohibition in the 21st Century" ("Saliendo de las Sombras: Terminando de le Prohibición de las Drogas en el Siglo XXI" en Español) was Gregorio Urias German, a Mexican congressman from Sinaloa, another part of the country that has suffered in the drug wars. Urias blames drug prohibition for this violence, but he fears that "If we can't even discuss the alternatives, if we can't even admit the drug war is a failure, then we will never solve the problem." He said that existing forums, such as the UN and the Organization of American States, are not fruitful places for discussion, "because only the repressive policies of the United States are discussed at these forums." While it is not the job of media outlets like Reuters to take a position favoring legalization in their news reporting, they will be doing a better job when they start to include leaders like Urias in their articles who hold that point of view. This Google News link will pull up a list of hundreds of appearances of this news story that are currently active in the mainstream media (many though not all the Reuters story or another by the AP). We encourage you to follow the links and submit some letters to the editor. Post them back here along with the letter-writing info for others.
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- The government of President Evo Morales approved a decree Monday requiring U.S. citizens to obtain visas to enter Bolivia. Morales said the decree "a matter of reciprocity." The U.S. government requires Bolivians to obtain visas to enter the United States. "We are a small country but we have the same dignity as any other," Morales said. The decree, approved during a Cabinet meeting, applies to other countries, including Serbia and Montenegro and Cyprus. In February 2006, Leonilda Zurita, a congresswoman belonging to Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party, had her U.S. visa revoked. Zurita said Washington cited an alleged link between her and terrorist activities, which she denied. Morales also cited security concerns for the rule. An American man has been charged with setting off bombs in two La Paz hotels in March. Two Bolivians were killed and seven people were injured, including an American woman. U.S. ties to Bolivia have been tense partly due to Morales' friendship with Presidents Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, as well as by Morales' background as the leader of coca growers fighting U.S. attempts to eradicate their crops.What the AP did not make clear is that the visa requirement for Bolivians to enter the US is a recent, post-911 move by the US reversing years of visa-free travel for South Americans coming north. The Brazilian government has also imposed a visa requirement for Americans now in this game of diplomatic tit-for-tat. Thanks, Mr. Bush. What this means for my trip is unclear at this point. The Bolivian consulate in Washington wasn't answering the phone today. One of colleagues in the Washington office will run over there first thing tomorrow morning to try to find out what the new requirements are and how fast I can actually get a visa. I am going first to Peru, which hasn't imposed a visa requirement, and it may be possible to get a visa there, but I don't know that yet. I'll keep you all updated on the situation. (Read the comment I've posted to learn a little more about Leonilda Zurita. - DB)
After many years of decline, the number of murders climbed in 2006 in New York and many other U.S. cities, including Rocky Mount, reaching their highest levels in a decade in some places. (Rocky Mount is a North Carolina community whose local paper drew on the AP story to produce this article. Among the reasons given: gangs, drugs, the easy availability of illegal guns, a disturbing tendency among young people to pull guns when they do not get the respect they demand and, in Houston at least, an influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.While drug warriors like former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani credited the "broken windows" theory of policing and tough sentences in general for the crime drop, criminologists pointed instead to a range of factors -- a decrease in the number of youth in the population figured prominently. (With my elementary school -- Roosevelt -- having been converted into a condominium -- The Roosevelt -- because of demographics, I was aware that fewer kids were growing up for awhile.) A corollary is that with youth numbers expected to go up again, crime would eventually go up again too. And now it has (yes, in New York too). The AP story did not go into the role of drug prohibition in all of this. Basically, it is prohibition of drugs that causes the vast majority of the drug-related violence -- pharmacologically-induced violence, acts committed because of being under the influence of drugs -- makes up only a small portion of the total. Drug-related violence is first and foremost the violence of the drug trade -- gangs and other sellers fighting it out over turf. The illegal drug trade exists solely because the drugs are illegal. The second most important cause of drug-related violence is economic crimes committed to get the money needed to buy drugs. This would mostly go away if drugs were legal because the price of the drugs would drop to normal market levels and addicts would not need to commit crimes to afford them. It's impossible to have a serious discussion of the causes of violence without discussing -- without even mentioning -- the consequences of prohibition. This must be stated over and over and over until the people leading the discussion take note. Click here to submit a letter to the editor to the Telegram, and here for info on their letter standards. Please make a post here with a link or letter to the editor information for any other papers where you see the AP story or articles based on it.