Here's Robert J. Caldwell at Human Events gloating over our extradition of 11 major drug traffickers from Mexico:

A counter-narcotics war popularly disparaged as a chronic loser, yet vital to the national interests of both Mexico and the United States, is producing its biggest victories ever.

Heck, let's give it to him. Biggest drug war victory ever! If there's such a thing, this has got to be it. We've made "an enormous leap forward" Karen Tandy proudly exclaimed from atop the first rung of her towering ladder to the moon.

This glowing triumph will provide a great opportunity to see if the drug war actually works. Maybe the Biggest Victory Ever will lead to a rock shortage down on crack street. But if it doesn't (and it so totally won't), then this grand achievement will serve only to illustrate that top priorities of the international drug war still don't bring us a day closer to the fairytale ending our drug warriors daydream about.

Indeed, the black market is a dragon with a thousand heads that regenerate if you cut one off. We can battle it for generations, but the beast will only grow stronger until we stop feeding it.

I'll pull out of South Dakota just after dawn, headed across the Northern Plains to Denver tonight, then over the high passes of the Rockies and on to Salt Lake City Wednesday night, so I can get up bright and early Thursday morning to attend the opening session of the Harm Reduction Project's 2nd National Conference on Methamphetamine, HIV, and Hepatis.

81-year-old Isaac Singletary was gunned down in his yard by police who were investigating someone else.

Singletary was known for chasing drug dealers off his property, but when he emerged with a gun and threatened two undercover officers lurking in his yard, they promptly took him down. It was Jacksonville, Florida's third fatal police shooting in 3 weeks.

An investigation is pending, but the police chief sounds confident (predictably) that the shooting was justified. From News4Jax.com:

"You don't expect somebody to come pointing a gun at you, and once they do that, the officers will tell them to drop the gun," JSO Chief Dwain Senterfitt said. "We're still investigating what statements were made, but obviously, at that point, the officers' lives were in danger."

I fail to understand what's so surprising about someone defending their property from unknown trespassers in a high-crime neighborhood. If the officers were surprised to be confronted, they shouldn't have been. They were out of uniform on private property.

It seems likely that both parties involved in this tragedy could have handled it better. Hindsight is 20/20. But the drug war is blind. Prohibition would still be a nightmare if police could enforce it without killing innocent people. Unfortunately, they can't.

Rest in peace, Isaac Singletary. And all the others.