Mexico's prisons are infested with internal crime, drug use, bad treatment and corruption. At some prisons, inmates are allowed to leave, provided with weapons, and loaned police vehicles to carry out their dirty work. Essentially, they use the prison itself as a safe house.

 

 

Dear friends:

Drug prohibition breeds innovation in smuggling techniques -- this is why such a small percentage of drugs is ever seized by authorities. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department struggles daily to keep drugs out of the nation's largest county jail system. Read about the elaborate schemes used to breach jailhouse security for major profit.

It looks like the Mexicans are finally understanding the folly of drug prohibition. Last week, Mexico's President Felipe Calderon agreed to open the door to discussions about the legalization of drugs. Now, Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, is joining with those urging Calderon to legalize drugs in Mexico, saying that legalization could break the economic power of the country's brutal drug trafficking organizations.

California's Proposition 19 on whether to legalize marijuana has fueled a debate among bloggers and pundits over this question: Because Canada exports a large percentage of its marijuana to the United States, could legalization in the U.S. cripple the Canadian economy?

PLEDGE DRIVE (1 Wk) FOR Drug Truth Network, Sun Aug 8, 6:30-7:30 PM...

Marijuana prohibition's days are numbered. Only 17% of those polled said that marijuana is the more dangerous than alcohol. A majority of respondents (65 percent) said that they believed that marijuana would be legal in the United States within ten years.

Drug prohibition has not been successful at stopping the production of opium or keeping foreign governments from being corrupted. Burma remains the world’s second-largest opium producer after Afghanistan, and processed 330 metric tonnes, or 17 per cent, of last year’s world supply, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2010 World Drug Report. Poppy cultivation has also been on a steady incline for the past three years.

For Immediate Release: August 5, 2010

Police Raid of Medical Cannabis Dispensary Puts Patients at Risk

Many fear that drug prohibition may play a roll in a future terrorist attack in the United States. Now, the U.S. State Department is warning that Mexico’s drug prohibition violence is straining local law enforcement in the northern part of the country, making it easier for terrorists to enter the U.S. through the border.

The NAACP thanks Congress and the president for a new law that will reduce the gap between federal mandatory sentences for convictions for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

 

Jack A. Cole,
Chairman of the Board

Are your stimulus dollars really being wasted on an Obama administration plot to get monkeys high on crack and cocaine as select Republicans and conservatives have been saying recently? No. The money is actually being spent on research into how to treat drug addiction in humans.

 

August 2010

Initiate This!

The Texas Coalition for Compassionate Care, Texas NORML, and Medcan University are lobbying legislators in hopes of reforming Texas’ marijuana laws. The organizations don't agree on strategy, however, with the TCCC pushing only for a limited law allowing medical use as a defense against criminal charges, and the others seeking broader legalization that would include permitting and regulating sales outlets.

Drug prohibition violence usually tends to negatively affect business, but that's not the case with businesses involving bulletproofing cars. Fourteen armoring companies are certified by Mexico's federal government, and business is getting better by the day.

With tens of millions of people living in states that protect the right of patients to use medical marijuana, inquiring minds want to know whether their doctor recommended medical care qualifies for tax deductions.

Daniel Okrent, the author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, answers readers' questions about marijuana and alcohol prohibition.

Backers of a new initiative to end the federal prohibition on marijuana made the case that a "silenced majority" of Americans are "beginning to rise up" to express their support for ending what they say has been a failed war on marijuana. The organizations -- Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and FireDogLake -- are circulating a petition online and on college campuses asking President Obama to end the federal ban on using the drug.

Officials in the Michigan cities of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills prohibited the dispensing of medical marijuana by creating laws that state it is "unlawful for any person or business to engage in any activity, conduct, use or venture in the city that is contrary to federal, state, or local laws or ordinances." Medical marijuana is still considered a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law, thus it would now be illegal to use in those cities even though 63 percent of voters statewide voted the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act (MMMA) into law. The ACLU sent letters to both cities challenging the ordinances, which the ACLU claims violate the rights of medical marijuana users.

U.S. drug policy condemns millions of our neighbors to be warehoused in prisons for nonviolent offenses. Today, 1 in 100 American adults is living behind bars. James Clark, a community organizer and Candler School of Theology graduate, reflects on the systemic denial of Christian love and compassion toward those struggling with addiction.

Drug prohibition allows for massive disparity in sentencing, and this disparity is one of the many reasons millions of Americans see it as the new Jim Crow. President Barack Obama signed into law a bill to reduce the disparity between federal mandatory sentences for convictions for crack cocaine and the powder form of the illegal drug. The quarter-century-old law that Congress changed with the bill Obama signed subjected tens of thousands of black cocaine users to long prison terms while specifying far more lenient sentences to those, mainly whites, caught with powder cocaine.

The Wall Street Journal wants to know what you think. Should employers create policies for workers with medical marijuana prescriptions? How should the conflicts be balanced?

Last year, Professor Neil McKeganey of the University of Glasgow, one of the most respected academics in Britain, established that the authorities seize just 1% of the heroin that enters Scotland in any one year. But where are the headlines about this utter failure? Documentary filmmaker Angus Macqueen thinks he knows the answer -- our drug policies have been hijacked by the emotive rhetoric of moralists.

The Archives of General Psychiatry published a randomized, controlled trial hailing ketamine as a promising treatment for depression among patients with bipolar disorder. The new paper says that in most cases ketamine "resulted in a robust and rapid (within minutes) antidepressant response."

With hundreds of billions of dollars involved, drug prohibition seems to corrupt at all levels. Now, a 60-year-old former Afghan police general who was in charge of border police in the three western provinces of Herat, Farah and Badghis is on trial for corruption charges -- accepting tens of thousands of dollars -- involved in the smuggling of 1,450 pounds of opium across the country's western border to Iran.