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From The Washington Post:

Soldiers trying to seize control of one Mexico's top drug-producing regions found the countryside teeming with a new hybrid marijuana plant that can be cultivated year-round and cannot be killed with pesticides.

Soldiers fanned out across some of the new fields Tuesday, pulling up plants by the root and burning them, as helicopter gunships clattered overhead to give them cover from a raging drug war in the western state of Michoacan. The plants' roots survive if they are doused with herbicide, said army Gen. Manuel Garcia.

You gotta hand it to these brave soldiers for standing their ground against such a resourceful enemy.

Research into marijuana hybridization has largely been conducted in secret, but it's well understood that this plant is particularly amenable to genetic modification. The abundance of diverse strains with silly names is more than a marketing scheme. Marijuana grows and breeds vigorously, thus it's relatively easy for knowledgeable people (who aren't in jail) to design marijuana plants that are ideal for certain growing conditions.

The ability to withstand chemical warfare is marijuana's most impressive achievement yet, although curing all sorts of diseases is pretty cool too.

I always feel a bit nutty when I say this, but it's true: marijuana is arguably Mother Nature's most impressive botanical accomplishment. Its ability to make people feel good has earned it some enemies among the anti-fun crowd, but that's only one of its many useful properties. You can also make nutritious food out of it, which is a great quality in a plant that grows so resiliently.

In this case, innovation was inspired by the drug war, but under other circumstances it's easy for sane people to assume that other noble purposes could be achieved by experimenting (scientifically) with marijuana. It requires great foolishness to miss the point that this magnificent plant is supposed to be used for something.

…and greater foolishness to think that it can be made to go away.

Very early on January 12, I will board a plane in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and that night I will be sleeping in a hotel in downtown Lima, Peru. That will be the first of 21 nights in the Drug War Chronicle's Coca Tour 2007, which will take me deep into the indigenous Andean coca heartland (but not to Colombia, where, for the most part, coca production is not tied to ancient tradition but to the global cocaine market).

A featured post today on the Huffington Post blog by Josh Sugarmann ask Crime is Back -- How Long Can We Avoid Talking About It? The author, referring to an article in yesterday's Washington Post predicts that crime will make it to back to the front burner in the nation's political agenda. One of the causes is the rise, after a lengthy drop in the number of young males in the population. The Plank, a blog published by The New Republic magazine, also predicts today that crime will figure more prominently in 2008 than in other recent political campaign seasons. That scares me. When crime becomes a political issue, reason and creativity tend to go out the window in favor of tough talk and slogans. The heinous mandatory minimums -- the laws that got Weldon Angelos 55 years, to pick just one case -- were the result of politicos focusing on crime. I seriously doubt that Sugarmann favors that kind of sentencing, aligned as he is with the liberal left. That said, the collective "we" have been avoiding talking one of the most important causes of crime, perhaps the most important, since long before the recent years' crime drop even began: drug prohibition. So long as drugs are illegal, young males (and others) will get recruited by the illicit drug trade, will possess guns as a part of that, and will carry the guns wherever they go. Sometimes they'll use them. Whether crime rises or drops, the violence rate in our society and around the world is dramatically greater than it would be if drugs were legal. All the money that people spend on illicit drugs, hundreds of billions of dollars per year, are going into the criminal underground because of the drug laws. How could that not have a serious increasing effect on violent crime? How much longer can we avoid talking about that? Having mentioned the Huffington Post and the New Republic, I'll point that out that Post published Arianna Huffington is herself a longtime opponent of the drug war, as is New Republic Senior Editor Andrew Sullivan. Whatever else should be done about crime, prohibition must get addressed. A conversation about violence that omits the issue of the drug laws is incomplete.

A new report proving that marijuana is America's number one cash crop has sparked significant interest around the blogoshere, mostly from fair-weather friends of our cause who recognize the absurdity of prohibiting a product of such enduring popularity.

Indeed, this news highlights the failure of prohibition, both for failing to eliminate the market, and for driving its value above that of various more popular vegetables.

But the fun part is reading what the anti-pot crowd has to say. The most entertaining entry in this regard is from Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters: Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias, who cites this story as evidence of a liberal media bias at CNN.

The year is coming to an end, and it is time to look back at 2006. What did we achieve? What did we fail to achieve? What were the highlights and lowlights for drug policy reform this year? I'm thinking I'll make a pair of feature articles out of this and I hereby invite you to submit your nominations for the best and worst of the year. They can be events, they can be trends...