Via The Agitator, John Walters is not having a good day.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. drug czar has been challenged to explain disputed statistics underlying a string of rosy reports on progress in cutting the flow of cocaine from South America, one of which prompted an expert to liken the official numbers to “lipstick […]

Link

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Possessing marijuana, cocaine and even heroin will no longer be a crime in Mexico if the drugs are carried in small amounts for personal use, under legislation passed by Congress. The measure given final passage by senators in a late night session on Thursday allows police to focus on their […]

At the Drug War Chronicle

A week after the US Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) issued a one-page opinion claiming marijuana has no proven medical uses — a position that ignores the much more comprehensive analysis done by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine in 1999 — a bipartisan group of 24 House members led by Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) has called on the agency to explain its reasoning and offer scientific proof for its position.
“Despite the fact that you are responding to a scientific question, your press release failed to provide any scientific expertise,” the representatives wrote in a Thursday letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach. “We call on you to show us the purported scientific evidence for the basis of this response. There is no evidence that you have new scientific proof or that you oversaw clinical trials. It perplexes us that even though the FDA is responsible for protecting public health, the agency has failed to respond adequately to the IOM’s findings seven years after the study’s publication date.”

Representatives who signed the letter: Maurice Hinchey, Ron Paul, Barney Frank, Sam Farr, Tammy Baldwin, Raþl Grijalva, Robert Wexler, Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Dana Rohrabacher, Jim McDermott, Tom Lantos, Jerrold Nadler, John Olver, Lois Capps, Julia Carson, Peter Stark, Jan Schakowsky, George Miller, Zoe Lofgren, Tom Allen, Barbara Lee, Gary Ackerman

These have been widely reported elsewhere, but in case you missed them, I wanted to give you the links: “bullet” Torturing Drug War Suspects: I talked about it some time ago, but Radley brings back to the net the case of the torture of Eugene Siler. Cops torture him to get him to sign a […]

“bullet” I’m recommending that you advance order Glenn Greenwald’s new book “How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.” While I don’t know if the drug war is specifically mentioned in the book, it has a lot of relevancy, as the book deals extensively with the further destruction of the […]