Snowflakes are falling in the Dakotas today. With winter coming to the High Plains, it's a good time to be thinking about heading south, and that's just what I intend to do in a few weeks, probably in early January. Thanks to a targeted gift from an individual donor (the same guy who financed my Afghanistan trip last year), I will be heading to Bolivia and Peru to report on the status of the Andean drug war.

My job requires me to look at countless drug-related newspaper articles every day in search of drug policy news. Most of those articles are not about drug policy, but about the more mundane daily drug busts. And the vast majority of articles about drug busts follow a simple template: Report the bust, report the cops' self-congratulatory remarks about making a difference. It is extremely rare for these run-of-the-mill drug bust stories to carry any context or raise the larger questions about the (f)utility of our current drug policies. That's why it's so heartwarming to come across a story like the one that was published in the Easton (Pennsylvania) Times-Express on Sunday.