Mark “Can I watch while you lock the cell door?” Souder meets Gil “Words aren’t in my vocabulary” Kerlikowske.

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) – U.S. Representative Mark Souder and Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Director Gil Kerlikowske will host a roundtable discussion on Monday, August 31 from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. regarding [...]

I thought it would be interesting to get the views of readers on different models of marijuana legalization (note: this is marijuana legalization only — we’ll explore other drugs in later polls).

Cato Unbound has another excellent discussion series on the war on drugs, this time focusing on Mexico, though naturally, the discussion ends up coming back to the U.S. time and time again as it must.

The lead essay — A U.S. War with Mexican Consequences — is by Jorge Castañeda, who was the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs from 2000-2003. He starts moving the discussion in an interesting direction.

If current trends toward medical decriminalization continue, if the Webb Commission in the Senate concludes that some changes in U.S. drug laws are necessary and desirable, and if the Obama administration pursues a de facto harm reduction approach without explicitly stating it, there may be a way for Mexico to extricate itself from its current, tragic predicament. Otherwise, though, there does not seem to be any accessible, affordable, and acceptable exit strategy from the current war. And Mexico will continue to pay an exorbitant cost for having plunged, with U.S. support and encouragement, into a war with no ostensible victory in sight. [...]

As long as criminalization, its hypocrisy, and serious discussions of the alternatives are banned from public discussion, U.S. drug policy will remain what it has been for the past forty years: a supply-side, foreign-policy, nickel-and-dime war waged beyond U.S. borders. In the case of Mexico, for a series of specific reasons, that policy, as well as domestic Mexican political considerations, have led to a war that cannot be won and should not be waged. [...]

There is no optimum solution to this conundrum. But the only conceivable alternative lies in a change in U.S. drug policy: not demand reduction, or supply interdiction, but decriminalization, harm reduction, adjusting laws to reality instead of uselessly attempting the opposite, and understanding that the last thing the United States needs is a fire next door.

Well, the conversion to the new site has been working quite well, and it seems people are finding it, for the most part. I’m still working on getting 301 re-directs for the pages on the old site and hope that those will be in place soon.

One great thing about the new site is [...]

Drug WarRant reader Chris found something interesting on the editorial page of a San Franciso newspaper from August 30, 1910 (full page available here as a pdf).

The paper was urging the municipal authorities to use their best efforts to “stop the use of narcotic poisons.” Their description of the problem in the editorial [...]