Missouri NORML is threatening recalcitrant rural counties with court orders over their failure to get expungements done, a pair of senators file a bill to fight Mexican cartels by increasing southbound inspections near the border, and more.

Missouri NORML Threatens Court Order Against Counties for Failing to Meet Expungement Deadline. Last Thursday was the deadline for counties to expunge all misdemeanor marijuana cases, but several rural counties failed to meet that deadline, and now Missouri NORML is threatening to seek a court order to force them do so.

The expungement provision was part of last November's Amendment 3 marijuana legalization initiative, but some of those counties have made little or no effort to comply, said Missouri NORML spokesman Dan Viets. "Many rural counties did not have a majority in favor of Article 14. In some cases, I think we are seeing a reflection of that fact in the reluctance of county officials to follow the constitution. Once the deadline has passed, there certainly is a basis for seeking a court order that the lower courts comply with the constitution. This is not a discretionary matter. It's not a matter of choice. It's a matter of mandate."

Nevada Legislature Approves Omnibus Marijuana Reform Bill. Lawmakers last week gave final approval to an omnibus marijuana law reform bill, Senate Bill 277, and sent it to the desk of Gov. Joe Lombardo (R). The bill revises upward the amount of weed a person can buy or possess from one ounce to 2.5 ounces and doubles the amount of allowable concentrates from one-eighth ounce to one-quarter ounce. The bill also gives medical marijuana dispensaries new flexibility to serve adult use customers.

Drug Policy

Senators Hassan, Lankford Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Combat Drug Cartels by Increasing Southbound Border Inspections US Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and James Lankford (R-OK), both members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, introduced bipartisan legislation to increase inspections of traffic going from the US to Mexico, which would help combat the flow of illicit firearms and money that fuel drug cartels.

"Shutting down drug cartels requires disrupting the supply chains that bring illicit guns and cartel profits from the US to Mexico," Senator Hassan said. "By significantly increasing inspections of southbound traffic at the Southern border, this bipartisan legislation will crack down on fentanyl and other drug trafficking and help save lives. I will continue working to address the opioid crisis that is devastating New Hampshire and urge my colleagues to join this important legislation."

Specifically, the bipartisan Enhancing Southbound Inspections to Combat Cartels Act would:

1. Require that at least 20 percent of southbound vehicles are inspected, to the extent practicable.

2. Authorize at least 500 additional Customs and Border Protection officers to assist with southbound inspections.

3. Authorize at least 100 additional Homeland Security Investigations agents.

4. Authorize 50 additional x-ray inspection systems for southbound inspections.

International

Peru Blows Up Clandestine Air Strips Used in Cocaine Trade. The government of embattled President Dina Boluarte continues to wage the war on drugs, proudly reporting that authorities have destroyed 18 clandestine air strips used to move coca leaf and cocaine from the Peruvian jungle into neighboring countries and Europe. The Peruvian National Police say their goal is destroy 30 air strips by year's end.

"The majority of these airstrips are located in very remote places and are guarded by heavily armed men. They generally extent more than 1 kilometer," said Pedro Yaranga, a Peruvian narcotrafficking and terrorism expert. "Most of the narco planes come from Bolivia. They also send drugs to Paraguay and some border areas of Brazil, with Europe as the final destination."

The strips were destroyed in the departments of Pasco, Huánuco, and Ucayali, where authorities also deployed monitoring and intelligence operations.

Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise by Lina Britto (2023, University of California Press, 332 pp., $29.95 PB)

The first time I smoked Colombian weed -- somewhere back around 1976 -- I toked up, scarfed down a bunch of Chips Ahoy cookies, and then had to pull over and puke on the side of the road. That stuff was so much stronger than the Mexican brick weed I was used to that it hit me like a trainwreck. Now, thanks to Colombian-born historian Lina Britto, I have a much clearer picture of who was behind that killer weed.

In Marijuana Boom, Britto adds elements of journalism, ethnography, and anthropology to her archival research to produce a rich, finely detailed portrait of northeastern Colombia, particularly the Greater Magdalena and the Guajira Peninsula, a long, skinny, mountainous arm poking out of Colombia into the Caribbean, and long a haven for maritime smuggling.

That is the heartland of the Colombian marijuana boom of the 1970s, but Britto situates the boom within a much larger and more complex context of national political projects to modernize and unify the country -- none of which succeeded in addressing issues of land tenure and social inequality, leading to repeated explosions of political violence and endemic social unrest. She also situates the marijuana boom squarely in the regional tradition of export agriculture booms, first bananas, then divi (a tree from which tannins for turning hides into leather can be extracted), followed by coffee.

And when the coffee boom petered out in the 1960s, all of the elements were in place for the next successful export commodity: marijuana. Marimba, as the locals called it (marijuana smugglers were marimberos), had been used and grown in Colombia for decades, having arrived with sailors making the circuits of the Caribbean. Thus, when American potheads freaked out by Richard Nixon's Operation Intercept shutting down the Mexican border (and access to Mexican weed) in 1969 went in search of alternate supplies and found good weed in northeastern Colombia, the social infrastructure was there to make marijuana the next export boom.

Sea-borne smugglers who had sharpened their skills on untaxed contraband coffee knew the routes, indigenous people of the Guajira and paisa emigrants from the Andean interior were ready to go to work growing the crops, and wealthy landowners, some politicians, and the politically connected were ready to invest the capital to reap the profits of prohibition. And an army of transporters, guides, middlemen, lawyers and bankers were there to help, too. Britto estimates that the business employed 150,000 people at its peak.

At its peak in the mid-1970s, the marijuana boom also had social legitimacy (and was a means of social mobility). The stuff had been made illegal in 1947, but being involved in the industry was still seen as being legitimate work -- not something criminal. While some marimberos got rich, many in the industry got merely the wages of agricultural workers, and in this sense, the marijuana boom merely replicated the social structures that had emerged in earlier agricultural booms.

Britto's analysis spans many levels -- from the granular detail of family vendettas in Barranquilla to the regional and national political projects and conflicts that shaped the nature of the boom to the international diplomatic level, where the desires of the United States loomed particularly large, and to the level of US domestic drug politics in the Jimmy Carter era. It was pressure from the US that led in 1978 to the Colombian government's first serious -- and ultimately successful -- effort to suppress the trade. Under sustained pressure from Colombian authorities aided by American dollars and expertise, within a couple of years the boom had gone bust.

And it largely vanished from the national imagination as Colombia was soon engulfed in the next drug boom, one that continues to this day: cocaine. But like the banana and coffee booms that created the infrastructure for the marijuana boom, the marijuana boom laid the groundwork for the much more violent and deadly cocaine trade.

Britto deserves kudos as well for her chapter on vallenato, the accordion-based cumbia offshoot that was the music of the marimberos. Rising stars in the pot trade cemented their social standing among their peers and society at large by sponsoring vallenato musicians and employing them to entertain at their parrandas, parties designed to show-off their wealth and generosity. The Colombia state has tried to recuperate and clean up vallenato as an important part of the country's musical patrimony, but it remains the music of the marimberos.

Marijuana Boom is a detailed, richly researched work that tells the story of a mostly forgotten era, but a boom whose suppression became the model for US and Colombian drug policy ever since.

More than 60 years after coca and cocaine were banned internationally under the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, and more than a half-century since the commencement of the modern war on drugs under US President Richard Nixon, cocaine is more popular and more prevalent than ever before. That is according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which just provided the evidence in its new report, The Global Report on Cocaine 2023.

While the report covers a number of aspects of cocaine production and consumption, its most striking finding is that after hiccups caused by global shutdowns during the pandemic, cocaine has come roaring back.

"The COVID-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on drug markets," UNODC found. "With international travel severely curtailed, producers struggled to get their product to market. Night clubs and bars were shut as officials ramped up their attempts to control the virus, causing demand to slump for drugs like cocaine that are often associated with those settings. However, the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today's levels."

UNODC found that cultivation of coca, the plant precursor to cocaine, increased a whopping 35 percent between 2020 and 2021, a record high and the largest year-over-year increase since 2016. The production of cocaine itself has been boosted by innovations in coca cultivation leading to larger yields and innovations in converting the plant into cocaine, also leading to larger yields.

That supply increase "has been matched by a similar swelling in demand, with many regions showing a steady rise in cocaine users over the past decade," UNODC wrote.

That is a product that is looking for and finding new markets, leading UNODC analysts to warn of continued growth in consumption.

"The surging global cocaine market has the potential to trigger large expansions in new regions where cocaine use has been limited in the past, especially Africa and Asia," said Chloé Carpentier, Chief of the Drug Research Section, Research and Trend Analysis Branch at UNODC.

"There has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade," the report noted. "Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use."

Cocaine use remains a largely Western phenomenon, but that is changing. North America constituted 30 percent of global demand in 2020, with South America and the Caribbean accounting for 24 percent, and Western Europe accounting for 21 percent. Africa was a distant fourth at nine percent.

But Africa is increasingly involved in the cocaine trade, leading to a "serious risk" of increased consumption there, UNODC warned. "The role of Africa, especially West and Central Africa, as a transit zone for cocaine on its way to markets in Europe has picked up substantially since 2019," the report said. "Both the total quantity seized in Africa and the number of large seizures appear to have reached record levels."

One impact of the pandemic was that the reduction is passenger flights lessened traffickers' ability to use drug mules, and UNODC found that the use of international parcel services for cocaine smuggling surged in response.

"Some countries in West Africa noted a significant increase in [parcel and courier] services to smuggle small quantities of cocaine to Europe and beyond. In Costa Rica, smaller quantities of cocaine were being mailed to Asia, Africa and Europe concealed in goods such as books, religious images, and vehicle spare parts," the report said.

"The pandemic may have accelerated the trend, but traffickers had already been increasing their use of international mail services to get cocaine into Europe," it said. "Evidence from Spain and Argentina points to a longer-term decline in the use of drug mules on passenger flights. Both countries recorded instances of larger shipments being concealed in unaccompanied luggage."

While the report discussed increased international cooperation to combat the cocaine trade, there is little indication so far that international cooperation has been able to stop it. In fact, the report itself suggests the opposite. But there is no consideration given to alternatives to the cocaine prohibition regime.

Medical marijuana is killed in Kansas but survives in Kentucky, cocaine production hits an all-time high, and more.

Medical Marijuana

Kansas GOP Lawmakers Kill Medical Marijuana Bill. Medical marijuana is dead for this session after Republicans in the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee voted to "table" the medical marijuana bill, Senate Bill 135. Both Democrats on the committee voted to keep the bill alive. The vote came after two days of hearings on the bill, including a full opposition slate of Republican state leaders, health officials, and law enforcement on Thursday.

Kentucky Senate Passes Medical Marijuana Bill. On the last day to keep the bill alive, the Senate voted Thursday to approve a medical marijuana bill, Senate Bill 47. The bill allows for the use of medical marijuana for a list of specified medical conditions, but does not allow for smokeable marijuana. It does set up a system of taxed and regulated medical marijuana production and sales. The House could vote on the bill when the legislature returns for a one-day session at the end of the month.

Foreign Policy

Marjorie Taylor Greene Claims Cartels Left Bomb at Border; It Was a Ball of Sand. MAGA political arsonist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told her two million Twitter followers Wednesday that Mexican drug cartels had planted bombs on US soil at the border to terrorize Americans and kill or injure Border Patrol agents. She posted a picture of what turned out to be a ball stuffed with sand and covered with duct tape and claimed it was "explosive" and a "bomb," adding that "this changes everything" and calling on the US military to "take action" and "end this Cartel led war against America!" But Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz quickly shot down Greene's incendiary claim, tweeting that "During a Jan. briefing, leadership was notified that Agents found a duct-taped ball filled with sand that wasn't deemed a threat to agents/public." Greene has not deleted her post and instead doubled-down on her theory in response to the fact check. "That’s not what the border patrol agents are telling me," she retorted on Twitter. But the "bomb" is still just a bag of sand.

Harm Reduction

Mississippi Governor Signs Fentanyl Test Strip Decriminalization Bill into Law. Gov. Tate Reeves (R) has signed into law House Bill 722, which decriminalizes fentanyl test strips by removing them from the state's definition of drug paraphernalia. Use of the strips is aimed primarily at reducing drug overdoses by letting users know what is in their drug supply. As Reeves signed the bill into law, he could not resist taking a jab at the Biden administration: "I’ve signed HB 722 which decriminalizes fentanyl testing strips," he said. "It’s a sad reality that fentanyl overdoses are skyrocketing as a result of an open border." In reality, .fentanyl's role in fatal drug overdoses began about a decade ago and has increased steadily through both the Trump and the Biden administrations.

International

Cocaine Production at Highest Level Ever, UNODC Says. In a new report, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) finds that cocaine production is at its highest level ever as demand rebounded after the pandemic and new trafficking hubs emerged. Production rose a whopping 35 percent between 2021 and 2022, at least in part because of innovations in cultivating the coca plant and in converting coca leaf into cocaine. "The Covid-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on drug markets. With international travel severely curtailed, producers struggled to get their product to market. Night clubs and bars were shut as officials ramped up their attempts to control the virus, causing demand to slump for drugs like cocaine," the report said. "However, the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels," it said. UNODC said nearly 2,000 tons of cocaine were produced in 2020, a continuation of a "dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels."

Last Year Saw a Surge in Drug Executions Worldwide. The number of people executed for drug offenses surged in 2022, according to a new report from drug policy reform group Harm Reduction International (HRI). The 1 cited at least 285 executions for drug offenses last year, more than double the 131 people executed in 2021. The number of people being handed out death sentences for drug offenses also grew, with at least 303 people in 18 countries facing the ultimate sanction. That is a 28 percent increase over 2021. The number of people currently on death row for drugs globally is now more than 3,700. HRI warned that the figures are low-balled because of the extreme secrecy surrounding the death penalty in countries that frequently resort to it, such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam.