Who woulda thunk it? An increasingly large chorus of nations - ravaged by trafficking and violence - say it's now time to re-think international drug policy. As the corrupting power of cartels grows across Mexico and Central America, and as the body count rises, legalisation needs to be seriously discussed as an alternative to militarisation, regional leaders say. It isn't a message US President Barack Obama wants to hear when he arrives in Cartagena, Colombia, to meet 33 heads of state on April 14. --snip-- Guatemala's President Otto Perez Molina, a former general during the country’s "dirty war", came to power promising an "iron fist" against delinquency. He recently called the war on drugs a failure and  argued  that "consumption and production should be legalised" within certain limits. Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, and arguably Washington's closest regional ally, has called for "a new approach" that...

Unbelievable . “What brings you to  Demopolis ?”  The question seemed harmless, as did the questioner, Sgt. Tim Soronen of the Demopolis, Alabama police department. Diane Avera, the 45-year-old grandmother from Meridian, Mississippi to whom that question was posed, couldn’t see any harm in answering it candidly. “I came over to buy some Sudafed for our scuba diving trip this weekend, since we can’t buy it in Meridian anymore,” Mrs. Avera explained.  Soronen asked Avera if she knew it was against the law to cross the state line to buy Sudafed.  “No, sir, I did not know,” the startled woman replied. “I need you to step out of the car,” Soronen demanded. “For what? I swear I didn’t know. What did I do?” Avera asked in alarm. “You came to Demopolis to buy some Sudafed,” came the curt response. “Step to the back of the truck.”  Before the sun set on July 29, 2010, Diane Avera was in the Marengo County Jail, where she would remain f...

Nose-spur warning: put down the coffee. [h/t Kids Prefer Cheese ]

You know the Drug Enforcement Administration has for years interfered in the ability of patients in chronic pain to access medical marijuan, but did you know that our Drug Gestapo also interferes in the delivery of prescription pain medication to your elderly relatives in nursing homes? WaPo : Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts.... The DEA has sought to prevent drug theft and abuse by staff members in nursing homes, requiring signatures from doctors and an extra layer of approvals when certain pain drugs are ordered for sick patients. The law, however, "fails to recognize how prescribing practitioners and the nurses who work for long-term care facilities and hospice programs actually order prescription medications," Kohl and White...

From WaPo : Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not , according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico. Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality. Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia. Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens to produce the more potent, and expensive, product that consumers now demand...

From Coyote the only sentence you really need to read to know we're simply insane: In the US last year, 754,224 people were arrested for possession (not dealing or production) of marijuana. Three-quarters of a million people. At that rate, we arrest 2.5% of our population every decade. Damn demon weed.

From WFTV : KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- A man is suing the Kissimmee Police Department for an arrest over mints. When officers pulled Donald May over for an expired tag, they thought the mints he was chewing were crack and arrested him. May told Eyewitness News they wouldn't let him out of jail for three months until tests proved the so-called drugs were candy. May said he was just minding his business, driving home from work, when a Kissimmee police officer pulled him over near 192. "I don't know how it occurred," he said. May was pulled over for an expired tag on his car. When the officer walked up to him, he noticed something white in May's mouth. May said it was breath mints, but the officer thought it was crack cocaine. "He took them out of my mouth and put them in a baggy and locked me up [for] possession of cocaine and tampering with evidence," May explained. The officer claimed he field-tested the evidence and it tested positive for drugs. The officer sai...

... and despite the government's deadly war on drugs for the past forty years, Baby Boomers--one of the most productive generations American has know--are still toking up. Reuters : WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Middle aged baby boomers are still turning on to illegal drugs forty years after Woodstock, doubling the rates of illicit drug use by the previous generation, according to a government study released on Wednesday. The rates of people aged 50 to 59 who admit to using illicit drugs in the past year nearly doubled from 5.1 percent in 2002 to 9.4 percent in 2007 while rates among all other age groups are the same or decreasing, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported. "These findings show that many in the Woodstock generation continue to use illicit drugs as they age," said SAMHSA Acting Administrator Eric Broderick. "This continued use poses medical risks to these individuals and is likely to put further strains on the nation's h...

.... because I'll probably be among my old college buddies : Although California has a huge population of residents carrying prescriptions for medical marijuana, the social stigma attached to the drug has led the elderly to be very hesitant about adopting it as a palliative for age-related problems such as loss of appetite, nausea and chronic pain. Now a luxury retirement community in Orange County, Laguna Woods Village, whose residents have discovered pot's benefits, has made weed easier to obtain by establishing its own pot collective. The community set up its collective because, although there are thousands of clinics in the state selling marijuana, none were convenient to the residents, some of whom have very limited mobility. For the greatest generation, taught to believe that marijuana was as addictive and deadly as drugs such as heroin, the reality has come as a pleasant surprise to many. NPR reports on the epiphany of a 73-year-old Leisure World resident and synchronize...

... is not simple, but it's doable. Governor Jack Markell gets about $93 million of his budget savings from cutting the salary and benefits of State employees across the board. Here's how you avoid that trap: 1) Instead of cutting salaries, put all State employees making under $100 K on two weeks furlough. That's roughly a 3.8% pay cut, but it is better than simply reducing salaries for two reasons. One: it meets the temporary requirement far better than a pay cut does; it's a hell of a lot easier to eliminate the furlough next year or the year after than it is to raise salaries 4-8%. Two: it gives the employees back the time to use as they prefer, rather than working them for the full year at lower wages. If it inconveniences some customers or causes some problems with service--well, shared pain is what it's all about, anyway. By my back of the envelope calculations, this would reduce the $80 million in savings from those workers to $34 million, leaving a de...

... which is that by allowing States to make their own determinations on medical marijuana he is causing the collapse of Mexico. This is the voice of John Walters , Dubya's drug control czar who is also roundly pissed that Obama has tossed his old position out of the cabinet: On the key issue of illegal drugs--the widely recognized source of criminal power in Mexico--the Obama administration is lurching dangerously in reverse. In his first statement on drug policy, Attorney General Eric Holder suggested he may no longer enforce federal law against trafficking marijuana if the traffickers call their marijuana medical. Both U.S. and Mexican officials at all levels know that medical marijuana is an utter fraud used to undermine drug enforcement in the United States. Mexican officials also know (as does the Justice Department) that much of the marijuana sold in the "dispensaries" of California funds the mafias of Mexico.... And what must Mexican officials think about Vice Pre...

I only ask because we seem to be planning a new military intervention ... in Mexico : In an interview today on NBC, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the US is in position to provide more help to the Mexican government to continue its fighting against drug cartels along the two nations’ border. Gates declared the drug war “a serious problem,” and said that he envisions the US providing training, surveillance and intelligence to Mexico. Gates also praised President Felipe Calderon for his willingness to take on the cartels, though the clashes have killed a significant number of people and led the US Joint Forces Command to conclude that the nation was at risk for a “rapid and sudden collapse.” Earlier this year it was reported that the US was considering playing an increasing role in the drug war, and the possibility of joint operations with the Mexican military was raised. Still, today’s comments by Gates were the most public acknowledgment that the Obama Administration is indee...

... and destroys all the evidence ... if it was ever there. From JD at Disloyal Opposition : Law-enforcement officers often claim that violent, paramilitary raids are necessary even in cases involving non-violent activity because you don't want suspects disposing of evidence after they hear a polite knock on the door. Nothing ruins a good case like 32 pounds of marijuana flushed down the toilet (but will the plumbing ever be the same?). But what if the SWAT team manages, by its own tactics, to destroy pretty much every scrap of evidence in the case? What do I mean? Try this San Antonio drug raid on for size: An East Side house was almost destroyed by fire after police used a "flash-bang" device when executing a high-risk narcotics warrant Tuesday night.... Before officers entered the home they used what is called by police as a "flash bang" device which is thrown into an area, makes a loud bang, and disorients people who may be nearby. The device has been used ...

... as a result of decriminalizing marijuana, which has--as Drug War Rant reports--caused the police to just ... give up: Massachusetts officially decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana yesterday, but many p olice departments across the state were essentially ignoring the voter-passed law, saying they would not even bother to ticket people they see smoking marijuana. While I don't like the idea of depending on the cops not to change their minds, it's important to remember if they do that the American Revolution didn't kick off until the British ended their policy of salutary neglect .

The so-far pretty accurate rumor mill is now reporting that President-elect Barack Obama intends to appoint 18-year-Minnesota-Republican Congressman Jim Ramstad as his new drug czar . Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic himself, is a strong opponent of medical marijuana and a believer in marijuana as an addictive drug. He is also a strong proponent of mandatory workplace drug testing, even when there are no safety and security ramifications to the job. I was disappointed with the Eric Holder nomination, in that he has consistently supported tougher enforcement and tougher sentencing guidelines even from non-violent drug-users , and this, to me, is a second strike on the domestic drug war agenda.

Here is another unfortunate victim of drug prohibition mania's human meat grinder, which daily wrecks the lives of 10's of 1000's of otherwise responsible peaceful people snared in its medieval jaws. This particularly-disgusting law enforcement idiocy not surprisingly began with the Department of Home(Father)land Security by way of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). BRITON JAILED IN US IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN FOR 'THIRD OF A JOINT' A Briton who has lived and worked legally in America for 35 years, married a US citizen and raised three children there, has been locked up in a New Jersey jail after falling victim to a draconian immigration crackdown prompted by the Sept 11 2001 terror attacks. Paul Clements, 58, a permanent US resident and former tour manager for bands such as the Rolling Stones and Dire Straits, is threatened with expulsion from his adopted homeland after his passport and green card were confiscated following a work trip abroad. ...

From the Media Awareness Project : A judge in St. John's recently decided that a man found with 14 grams of cocaine, 62 ecstasy pills and $11,000 in cash had an expectation of privacy when he checked his luggage prior to a flight in 2006. The ruling means the man can continue his legal battle to have the evidence against him thrown out. Brian Crisby, of Eastport, N. L., is charged with possession of ecstasy and cocaine for the purposes of trafficking. On Nov. 24, 2006, a police dog detected the drugs in Mr. Crisby's checked baggage in St. John's after his flight from Fort Mc-Murray, Alta. Police were acting on a tip. Mr. Crisby's lawyer, Mark Rogers, is trying to have the drugs and cash thrown out as evidence by arguing that the seizure was a violation of Mr. Crisby's Charter right against unlawful search and seizure. Mr. Rogers' first step is to prove that Mr. Crisby had an expectation of privacy over the contents of his luggage when he checked his b...

... of the bizarre legal system in this country that brands Wendy Whitaker of Macon GA as a Registered Sex Offender for the rest of her life... ... because when she was seventeen years old she got caught giving a blow job to a sixteen-year-old boy. Read the entire bizarre story of how the government keeps raping Wendy Whitaker at Classically Liberal , and ask yourself, "Should I be able to find this poor woman's photo and detailed information on the Federal Department of inJustice website?" [Try it--it's easy. User friendly, you might say.] I went to several of these Protect Your Children type websites that (for a modest fee) will tell you about sex offenders in your neighborhood. According to them, if I send in $12, I will get a list of the 35 registered sex offenders living in my zip code, right here in good old Pike Creek DE. You have to wonder how many of them committed the egregious sin of a little groping, fondling, fingering, or fellating in the back sea...

Massachusetts decriminalized possession of less than an ounce of marijuana last week, and the cops are complaining. OK, maybe crying and whining would be a better description: "It's definitely going to make it more complicated for us to do our job," said Pittsfield Police Capt. Michael J. Wynn, the ranking officer in charge of the Berkshires' largest police department. "It sets up this huge realm of questions." Wynn said the Pittsfield Police Department will have to develop a new citation and documentation system, for example, leading to administrative and legal headaches, not to mention additional costs. It also creates a whole new set of questions for a police officer who confronts a person caught with just under an ounce of pot. "Can we interview them? Can we interrogate them?" Wynn wondered. "It's going to be real tricky to figure out what this means, and there's no question that people are going to try to take advantage of this....

... with marijuana decriminalization passing in Massachusetts and medical marijuana getting the nod in Michigan. Both, I might add, occurred in spite of sustained fear-mongering campaigning by the Federal government. [n/t Drug War Rant ]