Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It’s just another sign of the failure of the drug war. What’s our exit strategy? Here’s the story in the New York Times.
Tag: war on drugs
Taxing Drugs
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the federal government will no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries was cheered by California dealers as well as state legislators who seek to legalize and tax sales of the drug. … Marijuana is [estimated as] a $14 billion crop in California. Taxing the drug $50 an ounce… would generate more than $1 billion annually…
Baltimore NAACP Vice President Arrested, Not Charged
The Vice President of the NAACP is out there copping like a junkie? He’s arrested and then not charged. I’m shocked. Shocked. WJZ reports: Police say Staten, who is an executive committee member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Maryland conference, was in the driver’s seat of a car that had stopped near Pennsylvania Avenue and…
How to Stop the Drug Wars
Long before the Simpsons did it, my brother started quoting ideas from the Economistjust to sound smart. I’ll be damned if quoting from them doesn’tmake him sound smarter! If you don’t read the Economist, you should. It’s notan economics journal. Just get over the name. It’s a world newspaper. But a magazine. And British. Like Timeand Newsweek. But for smart…
Drug Bust Oscars
Peter Hermann has a nice article giving Academy Awards for drug busts. So, if we’re handing out Academy Awards for cocaine seizures, Bealefeld’s Oscar might read “Best director for a drug bust,” while Clark’s might read “Best supporting director for a drug bust.” … It is a sad reminder that the drugs keep pouring in despite year after year of…
Mexico and the “Failed State”
Spin this all want, drug warriors, it’s not good. From Ciudad Juárez. The whole story in the New York Times is here. It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, a retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To make clear their insistence, they vowed to kill a police officer every…
Rockefeller Drug Laws Near End
With [David] Paterson in the governor’s mansion and Democrats in control of both houses of the State Legislature, an aggressive effort is under way to finally dismantle what remains of the stringent 1970s-era drug laws, which imposed stiff mandatory sentences as a way to combat the heroin epidemic then gripping New York City. Here‘s the story in the Times.
B*tch, stop lying!
Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora claims that US cocaine prices have increased 100% and purity dropped by 35% since the Mexican crackdown began in 2006. Really? Let’s examine that, shall we? In April 2007 John Walters (the drug czar) said that cocaine prices had declined 11 percent from February 2005 to October 2006, to about $135 per pure gram…
Wait till Next Year!
“Mexican president rejects ‘failed state’ label.” Well, I suppose he would. He also says he’ll have the war on the drugs pretty much wrapped up when he leaves office in 2012. Mean more than 1,000 people have been killed in Mexican war-on-drugs violence in the first eight weeks of 2009. According to the Mexican Attorney General, Eduardo Medina Mora, the…