An article by Michelle Keller in the Chicago Tribune today very factually reported on a police raid and shutdown of an open-air drug market. Fourteen suspects described as gang members were charged with conspiracy and delivery of a controlled substance, according to the article.

Special thanks to the roughly 1,000 DRCNet supporters who lobbied their Representatives in Congress to reject H.R. 5295, the so-called "Student and Teacher Safety Act." The House of Representatives unfortunately passed the bill, on a voice vote, which means there is no record of who voted yes and who voted no. It is also possible that there might not have really been the 2/3 majority needed to pass it, but without a member of Congress calling for a roll call, that is left up to the ear of the member leading the session. While a few Democrats did speak against the bill, none of them requested a voice vote, probably out of fear that Republican challengers would use the "Rep. So and So voted against a bill to keep kids away from drugs and guns" line in the upcoming campaigns in this high-stakes election season.

CLICK HERE FOR LATEST UPDATE UPDATE: It's on right now (5:39pm). Turn on C-Span or go to c-span.org, section "live streams."

Last Friday the blogosphere provided a good example of how readily even political progressives can fail to see the important points in drug policy. A post in Bob Geiger's U.S. Senate Report titled "Bill to Cripple Taliban Drug Trade Passes -- After GOP Tries to Kill It" informs us that Republican senators had unsuccessfully tried to block an amendment by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to put $700 million into the latest defense appropriations bill for suppression of Afghanistan's opium trade. Schumer explained, "The Taliban draws its strength from the drug trade and in order to prevent them from reclaiming the country, we need to crack down the drugs that fuel their regime. We need to ensure that the Department of Defense has the resources available to attack this problem before it becomes far worse."

This "Prohibition in the Media" post is not tied to a particular article. If you do a Google News search on "drug money laundering," you'll get a list of over 1,400 articles. These are only the ones that the news outlets still have online -- the global financial system is virtually "awash" in illicitly-generated revenues, much of it from the drug trade.

The North Hunterdon district in Clinton Township in southern New Jersey is debating their substance abuse policy, according to the Courier News.

Friends,

This note is just to provide some information on how best to do linking in your blog posts and comments here. If you put a http:// at the beginning of your URLs (or at least a www.) then our system should change them to hyperlinks automatically. For example, StoptheDrugWar.org won't be hyperlinked automatically, but http://stopthedrugwar.org will. Making the links live rather than just text should increase the benefit that posting here will have for your own efforts.

Sunday saw another article on the worrisome level of drug trade violence plaguing Mexico. (The link is to the Arizona Daily Star -- the web page attributes to the Dallas Morning News, but I could not find it on the DMN web site -- let us know if you spot it there.) The tone was ominous:

The scale of the lawlessness, its geographical reach, and the apparent inability of the government to keep it in check threaten Mexico's political stability, some analysts warn.

Analyst Javier Ibarrola of the Milenio newspaper says it is worse than it has ever been:

"I have never seen anything like this, ever," Ibarrola said.

Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine has opined once again on the Hurwitz pain case in The Accidental Drug Trafficker: A repudiation of prosecutions that treat doctors’ errors in judgment as felonies. If you haven't already, check out our news feature on this story <?php print l('here', 'chronicle/450/hurwitz_drug_convictions_overturned', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE); ?>.

Earlier this month Mexico's El Universal paper reported on the <?php print l('drug trade harming Mexican environmental efforts', 'speakeasy/prohibition/posts/2006/aug/02/drug_trade_hurting_mexic', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE); ?>. An article in today's San Francisco Chronicle made the same lament about Bay Area marijuana growing in state parks. Henry Coe State Park supervising ranger Mike Ferry told the Chronicle:

"At these gardens, we've found dead animals and birds, ammonia sulfate, pesticides and herbicides, ponds and creeks lined with plastics, and garbage all over the place," he said. "The environmental damage is huge."

El Universal's article made the key point, that the Chronicle article and few articles in US media yet make:

If narcotics are decriminalized, then the black market might cave in, and along with it the smuggling relationships that undermine conservation efforts.

So it would. And that's what has to happen here too. There is nothing intrinsic to marijuana growing that it should have this kind of effect on our national parks -- if people were illegally growing broccoli or tomatoes in the parks for the mass commercial market they would undoubtedly create the same kind of pollution that is hurting the animals. The problem is prohibition. The solution is: legalization. Unfortunately, while Mr. Ferry certainly seems to care about the environment and to be working hard on its behalf, he also has some ideas about drug policy that don't seem well thought out:

One dilemma "that is really throwing us," Ferry said, is the wide-scale acceptance of medical marijuana and the perception that casual marijuana use hurts nothing. But if marijuana smokers saw the carcasses of deer, squirrels, songbirds, owls and other wildlife shot or poisoned at the illegal groves, as Ferry has, perhaps they would understand the price wildlife pays for their next toke.

Blaming it on medical marijuana?!?!?!?!? No. Never mind that federal surveys found no increase in marijuana use in states that passed medical marijuana initiatives. (Could someone send in a link for this? I am having trouble finding it. I think it was part of a Monitoring the Future study one year.) Tell the feds and their ideological allies in certain cities and counties to stop shutting down coops who are in a position to contract with responsible growers. Hmm, I didn't set out to pick two SF Chronicle stories two days in a row. Maybe that's good. Again, here is their letter to the editor information. And again, please send us copies of your letters through our <?php print l('contact form', 'contact', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE); ?> -- select the "Copies of Letter You've Sent" option -- or post a copy in the comments here below.

The San Franciso Chronicle has reported that 30 suspected drug dealers were arrested in a crackdown on drug hot spots on Thursday. More arrests are planned as the sweep continues. Mayor Jerry Brown explained the reason for doing the sweeps:

"This violent subculture is very much connected to the sale of drugs in the same locations, year after year.''

Talking tough for the media, Brown continued:

"Oakland is not the place to do criminal business."

Captain Dave Kozicki added to the tough talk:

"Every drug dealer out there should be looking over their shoulder, wondering whether or not they, in fact, sold to an undercover officer."

Maybe some Oaklanders will be impressed, but I'm not. Frankly, I think comments like Brown's and Kozicki's are pretty silly. Clearly Oakland is a place to do drug dealing, or the drug dealers wouldn't be there. Do they seriously believe the drug trade isn't going to continue, in basically the same form, with at most an extremely brief (probably already over) and highly partial reduction? Or just moving to different locations? Obviously these are not the first drug arrests Oakland police have made during the "year after year" to which Brown referred. While I didn't look at all the details, a search of the SF Chronicle's archives going back to 1995 on the words "Oakland Drug Sweep" pulled up 130 listings -- I'm sure they weren't all really about drug sweeps, but a lot of them clearly were. Guys, the drugs are still there from after the last time you did this, and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that... The way to make Oakland -- and all of our cities -- no longer places to do criminal business is to end prohibition. Sweeps and busts only move the trade from place to place or hand the business from one seller to another. Only drug legalization can actually make that kind of crime not pay. Let the Chronicle know what you think by sending them a letter to the editor. Send us a copy using our new <?php print l('contact form', 'contact', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE); ?> -- select the "Copies of Letter You've Sent" option -- or post a copy in the comments here below.

Two weeks ago we <?php print l('reported in Drug War Chronicle', 'chronicle/448/south_dakota_medical_marijuana_lawsuit'); ?> that South Dakota medical marijuana patient Valerie Hanna had sued state attorney general Larry Long over a misleading (dishonest?) ballot summary of the state's upcoming initiative, charging the attorney general had violated state law. Yesterday Judge Max Gors opined in favor of Hanna -- and the rule of law -- according to the Associated Press:

"The whole impression leads one to believe that the attorney general wants voters to reject the initiative. The attorney general should confine his politicking to the stump and leave his bias out of the ballot statement that is supposed to be objective," Gors wrote.

The state is not appealing the decision because doing so would prevent them from meeting their ballot printing deadline of September 1. The AP story can be read for free on the web site of the Yankton Press & Dakotan, though you have to register first to get through. Score for our side! We told them so...

Thank you for checking out and signing up to participate in Reader Blogs in DRCNet's "Speakeasy." We hope you will continue to add your voices to our "choir" as we preach through this venue to the unconverted. With your help, the DRCNet Speakeasy can be a major force carving our new spaces for drug policy reform in the sphere of public dialogue and debate.

A conflict that doesn't make the US radar screen as often as it merits is the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers are a nasty group that among other abuses uses children as soldiers. I don't know enough about Sri Lanka's government to venture an opinion on its own human rights record, though a quick web search did not turn up anything quite so obvious or outrageous. I'm not too familiar with the causes of the conflict or issues that are driving it. Regardless of that, the Tigers are bad. Naturally, press living closer to the conflict cover it much more prominently.

The last week of June saw grizzly news from the popular Mexican resort town of Acapulco, according to Reuters, severed heads found in garbage bags near the US border and in front of government offices, and the police chief gunned down, all believed to be related to the drug trade. Violence including ambushes and executions of police officers has become routine in Tijuana as well, the article reported.

A few weeks we reported in Drug War Chronicle that New Jersey had become the only state in the nation not allowing needle exchange programs in some form or at least syringe purchase without a prescription -- the second to last state, Delaware, passed a needle exchange law last month.

A piece in Mexico's El Universal called illegal drugs the "root of evil for conservationists." From deforestation in Chihuahua's Copper Canyon by marijuana and opium growers to make way for their crops, to cocaine dumping near the fragile reef nurseries in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico by traffickers, writer Talli Nauman laments:

Following the life-without-parole murder convictions of three ringleaders of the Chester, Pennsylvania "Boyle Street Boys," an editorial in the DelcoTimes called on the community to "unite to defeat the criminals." The operation sounds pretty ugly. According to the editorialist, Andre Cooper and brothers Jamain and Vincent Williams ran a lucrative cocaine operation in the Highland Gardens section of Chester until 2003 and "[f]or years... depended on the "Snitch & Die" mentality to ensure the silence of those who witnessed their illegal drug and weapons business... One of their murder victims was a teenage drug dealer whom the gang members suspected of being a police informant... Another was a federal witness, a 33-year-old mother of two, who was executed in her sister’s car the day before she was going to testify against gang members. Her own cousins were among those who plotted her killing."

An article this morning in the Daily Journal in northeast Mississippi reports that efforts to restrict purchase of the chemical components of methamphetamine have caused a reduction in the number of meth labs in Lee County. But don't get too excited: there's just as much meth available in the county now as before. Now, though, it's imported, and the stuff is worse -- it's crystal meth, also known as ice, and according to Sheriff Jim Johnson it's a lot more potent than the stuff people are making locally.

A several part story by Audra Burch in the Miami Herald Sunday discussed the shooting death of nine-year old Sherdavia Jenkins, her life before it and her family in the aftermath. Jenkins was a bystander, playing with a brother and sister and friend, when she was struck down by a stray bullet in "an open space between two buildings that police say became a shooting gallery for a smalltime drug peddler and a street tough." It's the kind of tragic story that is tragically too common to always make the papers.