On August 25, the Los Angeles Times published an open editorial written by six former US drug czars referring to cannabis policies in the Netherlands while voicing their opposition to California's Proposition 19. On September 2, ENCOD president Fredrick Polak sent an open letter to the LA Times.

Times are good for marijuana growers of Mexico's western Sierra Madre mountains -- the army eradication squads that once hacked at the illicit marijuana fields have been diverted by the drug war raging elsewhere in Mexico. To the delight of traffickers, marijuana cultivation soared 35 percent last year and is now higher than at any time in nearly two decades.

Yet more evidence that the tired statement made by prohibitionists that "marijuana is a gateway drug" is false. Researchers said the predictors of whether someone uses harder drugs are social factors such as income status, psychological stress levels, employment status/potential, race and ethnicity, etc., not whether they ever smoked pot before. [Of course, more than a decade ago Institute of Medicine research conducted at the behest of Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- then the U.S. drug czar -- concluded "There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs", and that marijuana has been mistaken for a gateway drug in the past because "Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana -- usually before they are of legal age."]

Michigan’s medical marijuana law had its first dramatic day in an Oakland County court as a dozen people arrested in a medical marijuana raid on August 25 came before a judge for preliminary exams.

Drug traffickers exert influence over 71 percent of Mexico’s 2,439 municipal governments and completely control 195 of them. Criminal groups find it easy to dominate municipalities because local administrations are chronically short of money and suffer from neglect on the part of the state and federal governments.