Interdiction

Ciudad Juarez continues to earn the title of Mexico's drug war murder capital, but there was plenty of prohibition-fueled killing to go around this past week.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon's war against drug cartels reached a milestone late last week, but not the kind he's looking for: This year's prohibition-related death toll has gone over the 5,000 mark.

Here's the latest on the prohibition-related carnage wracking Mexico.

The US is employing a new tactic in Afghanistan: Killing or capturing drug traffickers linked to the Taliban (though not those linked to the Karzai government). Is that even legal under international law? The US military says it is, but not everyone agrees.

It's not just Marines pouring into Afghanistan this summer. As the Obama administration shifts its emphasis from poppy eradication to targeting traffickers, the DEA is expanding operations there big-time.

America's drug war in Latin America is a bipartisan affair. The Obama administration is negotiating with the Colombian government to create a major anti-drug base there to replace the one in Manta, Ecuador. Oh, and it also has nice force projection capabilities.

Faced with a growing Taliban insurgency fueled by opium and heroin profits and inflamed by the destruction of farmers' fields, the US last weekend announced a dramatic shift in its Afghan anti-drug strategy. The US will abandon what has been a pillar of its anti-drug strategy worldwide: eradication.

Relations between Bolivia and the US just got a little rockier as the Obama administration declined to restore trade preferences, citing Bolivia's "encouragement" of coca cultivation, and Bolivian President Morales responded with hard words.

The drug reform movement is not a monolith, and the rumored nomination of former Minnesota congressman, recovering alcoholic, and recovery advocated Jim Ramstad is showing where some of the fissures lie. But with an acting director appointed this week from ONDCP's current ranks, and with Ramstad himself jockeying for a different post, the exercise may be an intellectual one.

In recent years, South American cocaine traffickers aiming at lucrative European markets have made West Africa a favorite stop-over. Now, the narcs are following them.