Tucson, Arizona (CNN) — Last week during the day, some kids in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, were playing soccer in a park when a car slowed down, guys got out and executed a 13-year-old boy. And then they drove away, unmolested in a city with 11,000 army and police officers.

The Mexican government repeatedly states that 90 percent of the deaths in the current drug war are of people who are dirty; that is, criminals involved in the drug business. The killings of reporters and of innocent women, men and children continually belie that statement.

The child was not a cartel member in disguise. Nor were the 15 high school kids killed at a party in a small house in a poor barrio. Their parents had made them hold the celebration of a sports victory at home because it was too dangerous to be out in the city.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR CNN

U.S.-Mexico ‘war on drugs’ a failure – CNN.com.

The rule was hugely controversial when first proposed in 1995 and was never adopted by the agency because of a Supreme Court ruling that legislation was needed to empower the F.D.A. to regulate tobacco products. That legislation was passed and signed by President Obama last June. The rule goes into effect on June 22.

The tobacco industry adopted most of the rule’s provisions in 1998 as a result of litigation. And every state bans tobacco sales to minors, although enforcement provisions vary widely. The new rule provides consistent enforcement mechanisms across the country.

“The historic rule we’re issuing today will help our kids to stay healthy,” Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, said at a news conference.

Other provisions not adopted by the industry are still contentious and may end up in court, and even those that are not controversial may lead to changes across the country. For instance, the rule prohibits tobacco companies from using color advertising in store displays, a provision that a federal judge in Kentucky recently found unconstitutional.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Federal Tobacco Rule Is Set to Go Into Effect in June – NYTimes.com.

“Consumers need honest labeling so they can spend their food dollars wisely and avoid diet-related disease,” said CSPI senior staff attorney Ilene Ringel Heller, co-author of the report. “Companies should market their foods without resorting to the deceit and dishonesty that’s so common today. And, if they don’t, the FDA should make them.”

You can often decipher the truth amid the lies and misdirection by carefully reading food labels.

We take a look at nine things the CSPI identified as the most common ways food labels mislead so you can prepare before your next trip to the grocery store.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO YAHOO! Don’t be misled by these food label tricks | Yahoo! Green.

Within minutes of the weekend arrest of the La Familia drug cartel's operations chief, the gang launched deadly attacks in President Felipe Calderon's home state. In the worst, 12 federal agents were killed execution-style, their tortured bodies piled along a roadside as a warning for all to see.

The attacks following the weekend capture of Arnoldo Rueda spread quickly to at least 10 cities, including towns in two neighboring states. Officers' hotels were shot up. Grenades were tossed at police posts.

At least 18 federal agents and two soldiers were killed in the attacks and ambushes. Nearly two dozen officers were wounded.

Near the bloodied bodies of the 12 agents dumped in a heap Monday off a mountain highway near La Huacana was a message: “Let's see if you try to arrest another one.”

It was a blatant challenge to Calderon, who has deployed federal police and troops in an attempt to halt the country's escalating drug trade.

Calderon insists that the backlash to Rueda's arrest proves the cartel has been hurt.

“The arrests of dangerous leaders by the federal government in recent months is seriously affecting their operations and generating chaos in their ranks,” Calderon said. “Thus the violent and desperate reaction that we've seen these days.”

Government critics said the offensive revealed that federal forces are unprepared for the battle against heavily armed crime syndicates with extensive intelligence networks embedded within police forces.

They also said it undermines Calderon's repeated claims that violence shows the thugs are on the run.

A cartoon in the left-leaning La Jornada newspaper Wednesday depicted a bound and blindfolded policeman with a gun to his head. “Don't worry,” says a tied-up colleague kneeling beside him. “It's just another desperate action by organized crime because they're cornered.”

Mexico's national security spokesman, Monte Alejandro Rubido, said a La Familia suspect detained Monday told authorities gang leaders had sent an order to attack federal forces within minutes of Rueda's arrest in the Michoacan state capital of Morelia.

Dozens of gunmen carrying high-powered weapons and grenades attacked the station where Rueda was held. They failed to free him, but three federal agents were wounded by grenade fragments.

Convoys of other hit men fanned out across Michoacan and the neighboring states of Guerrero and Guanajuato.

Assailants gunned down two soldiers riding on a bicycle in their off hours outside their base in the town of Zamora. In Apatzingan, federal agents came under fire while sleeping at a hotel in a farming town ringed by mango orchards. Others were ambushed in patrol cars on lonesome highways. Three federal agents were fatally shot as they raced to a reported car accident, which turned out to be an ambush.

“This clearly shows federal forces are vulnerable,” said Jorge Chabat, a Mexican drug expert. “The government needs to rethink its police protection scheme. If they don't, no one is going to want to be a police officer or soldier. There is not enough protection for them.”

The government has not said whether federal agents are quitting out of fear, although several towns have seen local police leave in droves after feeling threatened.

Calderon has sent an estimated 45,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of federal agents to drug hot spots — from Mexico's steamy Gulf coast to its colonial mountain villages to its desert outposts.

via Mexican cartel seeks revenge, escalates drug war – Yahoo! News.

That same night, Ryan Richards, 19, abruptly left a friend’s house after getting a cellphone call. His body was found the next morning behind a rural produce store. The stab wounds on his hands told the tale of a furious fight for his life. The undertaker apologized to his family for not being able to conceal them.

The bodies of two local high school seniors, Dilsher Gill, 17, and Joseph Randay, 18, were found May 1 in their car on a remote road just outside this normally quiet town of 134,000 near Vancouver. The boys had been seen driving away with an armed man the night before.

This crisp region of polished high-rises, emerald spruce, azure waterways and feel-good vibes finds itself in the midst of a gang war that has killed at least 18 young people this year.

Drug dealers are gunning down women (one in a car with her 4-year-old son in the back seat), high school students with no gang allegiances and, especially, one another, in broad daylight in and around the city that will host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

It got so bad this spring that police erected concrete barriers outside the homes of two gangsters to slow down potential drive-by assassins.

“Let’s get serious. There is a gang war, and it’s brutal. What we have seen are new rules of engagement for the gangsters,” Vancouver’s chief police constable, Jim Chu, told reporters in March.

Authorities trace the violence to the recent government crackdown on cocaine traffickers in Mexico, which has squeezed profit margins for cocaine north of the U.S. border.

Canada’s outlaw retailers are fighting to the death over market share, police say, a situation exacerbated by personal vendettas and power vacuums left by the arrests of gang leaders.

“The war in Mexico directly impacts on the drug trade in Canada. . . . There’s a complete disruption of the flow of cocaine into Canada, and we are seeing the result,” said Pat Fogarty, operations officer for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, British Columbia’s main law enforcement agency targeting organized crime.

The province became an important player in the Mexican cocaine marketplace in part by bartering its powerful home-grown marijuana, “B.C. Bud,” which helps fuel what is estimated to be a $6.3-billion-a-year industry.

Canadian drug organizations now use planes, helicopters and, in one case, a tunnel to move drugs. They have equipped trucks with secret panels and devices to avoid detection by X-rays and drug-sniffing dogs.

The Lower Mainland has become a playground for young up-and-coming gangsters, who speed around town in armor-plated Cadillac Escalades, Porsche SUVs and BMW sedans.

The worst violence can be traced to the verdant Fraser Valley southeast of Vancouver, where the Red Scorpions gang has been at war with a multi-ethnic criminal organization called the United Nations.

The founder of the U.N. is Clayton Roueche, 33, son of a scrap metal dealer from Chilliwack, population 80,000.

Authorities believe Roueche was going to attend a wedding and meet trafficking associates in Mexico in May 2008 when authorities there turned him away. He was flown to Dallas, where U.S. agents arrested him on a drug indictment out of Seattle. He pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy and money-laundering charges and faces as many as 30 years in prison.

Two months later, the man he allegedly was going to meet in Mexico was shot to death in a Guadalajara restaurant, along with another U.N. associate.

The U.N. adopted its name in honor of the variety of nationalities it encompasses, including Iraqis, Chinese and Guatemalans. It is known for its Asian mystic-themed motto of “Honor-Loyalty-Respect,” created by Roueche, who has a passion for martial arts and Buddhism.

The cemetery in Chilliwack is dominated by the graves of two former U.N. members, flanked by a pair of 5-foot-tall granite monuments inscribed with the same “U.N.” monogram found on the gang’s packets of cocaine. The phrase “Warrior of the United Nations” is engraved in Chinese characters. At the foot of the graves, a pair of stone Chinese foo lions stands guard.

The carnage between the U.N. and the Red Scorpions is believed to stem from the fatal shootings of six men in an apartment in the comfortable suburb of Surrey in 2007.

Five associates of the Red Scorpions have been arrested in the case. One pleaded guilty and was sentenced in April to life in prison.

Dozens of other slayings followed, many of them retribution killings and commercial disputes between the U.N. and three Abbotsford men associated with the Red Scorpions: the Bacon brothers.

Jonathan Bacon, 28, and his brothers, Jarrod, 26, and Jamie, 23, are the rock stars of the Fraser Valley underworld, their exploits and the efforts of the police to keep them alive documented regularly in the media.

Jamie Bacon, who was charged in April in one of the Surrey Six slayings, survived a mid-afternoon shooting at an Abbotsford intersection Jan. 20, when a gunman fired as many as eight bullets into his Mercedes.

Jonathan Bacon was shot and wounded in the driveway of his parents’ home in Abbotsford in 2006.

Not surprisingly, the Bacons have changed residences several times, and their car has armored plating and bulletproof windows. They kept an arsenal for protection: As part of a plea bargain for an associate in 2007, Jonathan Bacon delivered to police 114 sticks of dynamite, a grenade, seven handguns, two shotguns, a rifle and an Uzi submachine gun.

With so many people apparently eager to kill a Bacon brother, police took the unusual step this year of warning citizens to avoid the family or risk being caught in the crossfire.

That is what happened to Jonathan Barber, 24, who ran a custom stereo business in Abbotsford. One night in May, Barber picked up a Porsche Cayenne SUV belonging to one of the Bacon brothers to install a new audio system. A gunman opened fire, killing Barber and injuring his 17-year-old girlfriend.

“Young people in the past used to have a fight in the schoolyard. In a park or something. But now everyone seems to have a gun,” Barber’s father, Michael, said one recent afternoon. “There used to be a code in gangs: Don’t touch the women, don’t touch the children. But no one is safe anymore. No one is safe in our city.”

Mathea Angelica Sturm, a 17-year-old student at W.J. Mouat Secondary School, started a Facebook page recently to memorialize the young people who have died in Abbotsford and Chilliwack. The names quickly numbered in the dozens.

Among them were Dilsher Gill and Joseph Randay, the two teenagers found dead in their car in May. Both were seniors at Mouat.

“You see it in movies and stuff, but you never think it’s going to happen in your town,” Sturm said. “Especially in Abbotsford. It was a pretty peaceful town, and then all of a sudden, it was like a big swoop of something came in.”

Her mother, Wendy, said: “It kills me that every week my child comes home in agony, in tears, that she lost another friend. And to have the three most notorious gangsters [the Bacon brothers] living in our own town? My other daughter is terrified to go to her own high school reunion because she went to school with one of them.”

Police, the mayor and the school board chairman recently issued a letter warning parents and students that even the slightest involvement in drugs or gangs can be dangerous. Neither Gill nor Randay was a known gang member, friends say.

Ryan Richards, the 19-year-old whose body was found behind the produce shop, got involved with the Red Scorpions only because he couldn’t get financial aid for college, according to his mother, Wendy, who was hospitalized after her son’s death and still breaks down in sobs.

“He said he wanted out,” she said.

“He told another kid, ‘Don’t do it. It’s not a very good life. I’m getting out of it,’ ” Wendy Richards said one recent afternoon, sitting on the front porch and hugging her knees.

Richards said she believes her son was a low-level salesman who may have come under suspicion within the Scorpions. He had been taken into custody a few weeks before his death, and his cellphones were confiscated.

“They might have thought that he ratted them out,” said her boyfriend, Ken Peters. “So they sent somebody out. Somebody who has no remorse.”

On a Friday night in the Lower Mainland, two teams from the integrated gang task force patrol the restaurants, clubs and bars where gang members drink, spar and sometimes kill.  FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE LOS  ANGELES TIMES.  The L. A. Times is the west coast’s leading newspaper.  Article by Kim Murphy

FEEDBACK:  SHOULD THE WAR ON DRUGS BE AN OBAMA PRIORITY?

via Drug war on another border: Canada – Los Angeles Times.

Made public for the first time, the detailed reports describe the dirty intricacies of drug dealing in many cities, including the Baltimore/Washington area. For instance, “package delivery services are increasingly being used by drug traffickers in the region, particularly to transport marijuana, which is typically sent in multi-pound parcels from the Southwest Border area. Many drug traffickers prefer to use package delivery services because they can monitor the progress of shipments on the Internet.” More of the cocaine comes from cartels based in New York City, according to the report. Marijuana comes from Mexico through Georgia and North Carolina. Vietnamese traffickers from Toronto are the primary ecstasy traffickers in the region, while gangs bring in most of the PCP from California, often in plastic bottles in checked airline luggage.

Or how about the president’s home of Chicago, dubbed one of the biggest drug markets in the nation? Below is from the report.

Strategic Drug Threat Developments

Drug-related gang violence, particularly homicide, increased in Chicago, Illinois, in 2008. According to the Chicago Police Department, gang-related murders in Chicago, often resulting from drug-related disputes, increased 36.3 percent from 2007 (168 murders) through 2008 (229 murders).

Street gang drug distribution operations are concentrated in urban areas of Chicago; however, suburban law enforcement agencies, many of which lack sufficient resources, report an increasing presence of Chicago gang members who distribute drugs in their jurisdictions. Officials attribute the movement of gang members from Chicago to suburban areas to several factors: the breakdown of traditional hierarchical gang structures, the razing of some large Chicago public housing projects, an abundance of wholesale illicit drug suppliers, and the expectation of high profits from new suburban drug operations.

Cocaine trafficking and abuse in the Chicago HIDTA region are widespread; however, law enforcement officials reported decreases in wholesale cocaine availability during the second half of 2008, evidenced by increased wholesale cocaine prices and decreased cocaine purity levels.

The availability of and demand for high-potency marijuana are increasing. Mexican, Asian (primarily Chinese and Vietnamese) and, increasingly, Caucasian drug trafficking groups transport high-potency marijuana to the region from California and Washington. Asian, Albanian, and Caucasian drug traffickers also transport wholesale quantities of the drug to the region from Canada.

Local indoor cultivation of high-potency cannabis in the region is increasing. Further, indoor cannabis cultivation, primarily among local independent drug traffickers growing a small number of cannabis plants, is more prevalent than it had been in previous years.

The availability and abuse of MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as ecstasy) are rising in the Chicago HIDTA region, particularly in African American and Hispanic communities. Rising availability and abuse are most likely the result of increased retail-level distribution by African American and Hispanic street gangs, which are typically supplied by Canada-based Asian traffickers.

Overview

The Chicago HIDTA region, composed of Cook, Grundy, Kendall, and Will Counties, comprises more than 6.1 million residents—nearly half of the population of Illinois.1 The Chicago metropolitan area is one of the nation’s largest drug markets and a national-level distribution center for cocaine, heroin, and marijuana available in the Midwest and the eastern United States. Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago, is second only to Los Angeles County, California, as the most populated county in the United States. According to U.S. Census estimates, Kendall County and Will County are two of the fastest-growing counties in the United States; those populations have grown 77.5 percent and 34.1 percent, respectively, from 2000 through 2007.

The Chicago metropolitan area is densely populated and ethnically diverse, enabling members of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), criminal groups, and street gangs to assimilate within communities and conceal their drug trafficking activities. The Mexican community in Chicago, the second-largest of any metropolitan area in the United States, is experiencing substantial growth as a result of ongoing immigration and higher-than-average birth rates. Chicago also has the fifth-largest immigrant population among U.S. metropolitan areas, with approximately 1.4 million immigrants. The largest immigrant populations in the metropolitan area are from Mexico, Poland, and India, while the fastest-growing populations are from Ghana, Nigeria, Russia, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Although ethnic communities are typically concentrated in Cook County, suburban counties are also experiencing substantial growth in immigrant populations.

The region has a highly developed transportation infrastructure that facilitates the continuous movement of licit and illicit goods to and from the area. Chicago is one of the nation’s largest trucking centers, principally because of the city’s proximity to Interstates 55, 57, 80, 88, 90, and 94, which pass through the metropolitan area. These major highways are frequently used by traffickers to transport illicit drugs to Chicago from Mexico and locations along the Southwest Border. Two major international airports, O’Hare and Midway, are located within the HIDTA region; they processed approximately 86 million passengers and approximately 1.4 million tons of cargo during 2008. These major airports are frequently used by traffickers to smuggle illicit drugs into the Chicago area. In addition, Chicago’s train, bus, mail, and parcel delivery services are exploited by DTOs, criminal groups, and street gangs to transport drugs and drug proceeds to and from the region.

Article By Alex Kingsbury, for U.S. News.  For more news and information, click the link below for U. S. News.  U. S. is one of the nation’s leading magazines.  Go to their website now for a special one year subscription offer.

FEEDBACK:  What is happening with the ‘War On Drugs’ in America?

Drug Dealers’ Secrets Revealed in Justice Department Reports – Washington Whispers (usnews.com).

“This is it,” he says about the powerful hallucinogen Salvia divinorum, known as “magic mint.” In just a few years, it has emerged from Mexico’s Indian villages into one of the hottest drugs in the USA and a crucial cash crop for poor farmers here.

The good times may be coming to an end, as 11 states have rushed to pass laws that restrict the use of salvia, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is studying whether it should be banned nationwide.

“There was no legitimate purpose for that herb, and the things it was being used for were potentially harmful,” says Thom Collier, a former state representative who wrote the Ohio law that outlawed salvia in April. “We thought it would be better to deter this sooner than later.”

A ban in Nebraska takes effect in September. California and Maine prohibit selling salvia to minors, and Louisiana and Tennessee limit it to animal consumption, as in scientific research. Ten countries ban salvia, and six others have restrictions on selling it, according to the Salvia divinorum Research and Information Center, a website about salvia.

Wholesalers are already making fewer trips to Mexico’s Sierra Mazateca as the legal markets dry up. Carlos Campos, president of Aztecas Plants, says his company has a warehouse full of salvia in the Mexican city of Orizaba. He told farmers who grow the crop to cut production.

“This is an important part of their economy,” Campos says. “These legal issues really hurt.”

The United States and Mexico don’t keep figures on salvia sales, but Campos said business was booming until just recently. In 2008, he exported 8 tons of salvia leaves to the U.S. and Europe, up from 550 pounds in 2002.

Videos on websites such as YouTube showing users laughing hysterically after a few puffs helped spur salvia’s popularity. A 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said 1.8 million Americans have used the herb, and 756,000 had used it the previous year.

On a recent afternoon, Steve Pollard, owner of Arena Ethnobotanicals, an importer based in Britain and San Diego, and Campos handed out roasted chicken, tortillas and beer to about 50 Mazatecs who had hiked two hours through the mountains to sell their salvia leaves.

By mid-afternoon Campos’ truck was filled with black garbage bags containing 1,185 pounds of dried salvia leaf.

Before salvia, this region about 170 miles southeast of Mexico City was better known for its psychedelic mushrooms. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, came here to try them with the Mazatec medicine men. So did the Beatles’ George Harrison.

The magic mushrooms, salvia leaves and psychedelic seeds of morning glories make up the Mazatec medicine man’s “tool kit” to help diagnose illnesses, says Jose Luis Díaz, an expert on traditional psychedelics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The local healers grind the leaves into a drink and feed it to a patient. “It’s done in silence, in a dark place, to avoid any outside stimulus that might interfere with the experience,” Díaz says.

The hallucinations can be intensely emotional and include feelings of floating above the body or having visions, Díaz says. Most foreigners smoke the leaf, says John Boyd, CEO of Arena Ethnobotanicals. “Head shops” and Internet sites sell leaves fortified with salvia extract, making them five to 35 times stronger.

“It’s not a party drug, and it’s not a substitute for marijuana,” Boyd says. “Most people try it once, put it in a drawer and never touch it again.”

Many farmers here say they don’t really understand the legal issues over salvia. Federico Basilio looks confused when a reporter refers to the leaves as an enervante, or drug.

“I don’t really know how they use (salvia) up there,” Basilio says of the USA. “But for us, it’s been a good crop.”  Article by Chris Hawley for USA Today.  For more news and information, click the link below for www.usatoday.com.  Support USA Today and you local newspaper.

Please share your thoughts with us below.

‘Magic mint’ hallucinogen under fire in U.S. – USATODAY.com.

But only now — with thousands dead and the threat of violence spilling on to American soil — is the U.S. government enlisting a comprehensive strategy to stop weapons traffickers, contends a new government report.

About 87 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico over the past five years that were traced back to their original owners were purchased in the United States, it finds.

“The availability of firearms illegally flowing from the United States into Mexico has armed and emboldened a dangerous criminal element in Mexico, and it has made the brutal work of the drug cartels even more deadly,” said U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, which commissioned the report.

In many instances, the weaponry came from gun shops and gun shows in the border states of Texas, Arizona, California and New Mexico, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office.

A three-part San Antonio Express-News series about gunrunning published last November and December showed Texas gun retailers are the cartels’ primary source for powerful firearms and ammunition bought legally but then smuggled into Mexico.

The report released Thursday notes that among the problems in curbing the flow of weapons have been U.S. federal laws restricting the compiling of information on weapons purchasers in the United States.

Other factors are problems with U.S. law enforcement agencies cooperating with each other, and rampant corruption in Mexico.

Violence has jumped significantly across the border as Mexican President Felipe Calderón has sought to combat the cartels, throwing them into disarray as they battle each other as well as government soldiers and police.

Last year, more than 6,200 people were killed in the violence, more than twice the number in 2006, the report notes.

In coordination with the ATF, the National Shooting Sports Foundation is to launch a campaign next week to remind gun sellers and gun buyers it is a felony to buy guns for someone who’s not permitted to do so under the law.

Alexa Fritts, a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, said the U.S. government should enforce existing gun laws, instead of creating new ones.

“Eroding our laws here in the United States will do nothing to fix these problems in Mexico,” she said. “We are talking about a Mexican problem that needs a Mexican solution.”

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said he welcomes more discussion about weapons trafficking.

“Anyone who wanted to outfit their private army could do so very easily in this county,” he said.

I had a source of mine, a local reporter, call me four hours earlier to tell me to meet him at a specific restaurant at 1am because he had some photographs and information for me. I was investigating a specific series of brutal murders that had taken place in the Laredo corridor. This meeting with a contact wasn’t all that unusual—most of the investigative journalists in Mexico work under intense circumstances as they often fall upon information relating to the drug cartels that they either can not, or will not, report on because it would be a death sentence for them.Therefore, they give the information to someone like me who will get it aired or published in a way that does not connect them.

I arrived early to the restaurant and since the weather was pleasant, I decided to take a seat on the patio and have a glass of tea. I sat for a few minutes when my source arrived and sat down, ordered a drink and handed me a large white envelope. He told me this was everything I had been asking his editor about the day before and that I should be careful how I use it. I thanked him, (by paying him), and we talked for about 20 minutes after which he asked if I could give him a ride home.

He got into my rental car and told me to drive towards his house on the outskirts of town. We drove past the airport and headed towards Monterrey, and just as I was about to make the turn off the highway to drop him near his home, we saw three sets of headlights about two hundred yards off the main road in a desolate section of land.  Article by Rusty Fleming, Documentary Filmmaker and Author, www.drugwarsthemovie.com.  Filed by Anderson Cooper on CNN.  For more new and information, click the link below for CNN.  CNN is the first name in cable news.

Please share your thoughts with us.

via Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive – “Come on….It’s just pot” « – Blogs from CNN.com.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

I’ve seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth. Yet I find people like Mr. Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

Mr. Stamper is active in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an organization of police officers, prosecutors, judges and citizens who favor a dramatic liberalization of American drug laws. He said he gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967 when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.

“I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his own home, for possession of marijuana,” he recalled. “I literally broke down the door, on the basis of probable cause. I took him to jail on a felony charge.” The arrest and related paperwork took several hours, and Mr. Stamper suddenly had an “aha!” moment: “I could be doing real police work.”

It’s now broadly acknowledged that the drug war approach has failed. President Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to banish the war on drugs phraseology, while shifting more toward treatment over imprisonment.

The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there’s a genuine risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small. After all, cocaine was used at only one-fifth of current levels when it was legal in the United States before 1914. And those states that have decriminalized marijuana possession have not seen surging consumption.

“I don’t see any big downside to marijuana decriminalization,” said Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland who has been skeptical of some of the arguments of the legalization camp. At most, he said, there would be only a modest increase in usage.

Moving forward, we need to be less ideological and more empirical in figuring out what works in combating America’s drug problem. One approach would be for a state or two to experiment with legalization of marijuana, allowing it to be sold by licensed pharmacists, while measuring the impact on usage and crime.

I’m not the only one who is rethinking these issues. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has sponsored legislation to create a presidential commission to examine various elements of the criminal justice system, including drug policy. So far 28 senators have co-sponsored the legislation, and Mr. Webb says that Mr. Obama has been supportive of the idea as well.

“Our nation’s broken drug policies are just one reason why we must re-examine the entire criminal justice system,” Mr. Webb says. That’s a brave position for a politician, and it’s the kind of leadership that we need as we grope toward a more effective strategy against narcotics in America.  Opinion by Nicholas D. Kristof for the New York Times.  For more news and information, click the link below for www.nytimes.com.  The New York Times is the nation’s leading newspaper.  Support the New York Times and your local press.

Please contribute your thoughts below.

Op-Ed Columnist – Drugs Won the War – NYTimes.com.