WASHINGTON – Federal drug agents won't pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration

President Obama ought to announce the policy change as bowing to the dictates of individual liberty in a classical liberal society, but small steps are good too.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico enacted a controversial law on Thursday that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging free government treatment for drug dependency.

The law defines "personal use" amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamines. People detained with those quantities no longer face criminal prosecution when the law goes into effect on Friday.

Anyone caught with drug amounts under the personal-use limit will be encouraged to seek treatment, and for those caught a third time treatment is mandatory — although the law does not specify penalties for noncompliance.

Victim was a drug gang lieutenant and U.S. informant

EL PASO, Texas - An 18-year-old U.S. Army soldier and two other men have been charged with capital murder in the contract killing of a midlevel Mexican drug cartel official who was also a U.S. informant.

Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, who was based at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, and Christopher Duran, 17, were hired by 30-year-old Ruben Rodriguez Dorado to carry out the May 15 shooting of Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, police said Tuesday. Gonzalez was shot eight times outside his pricey El Paso home.

Violence in Mexico, crumbling budgets build momentum for debate

NEW YORK - The savage drug war in Mexico. Crumbling state budgets. Weariness with current drug policy. The election of a president who said, "Yes — I inhaled."

These developments and others are kindling unprecedented optimism among the many Americans who want to see marijuana legalized.

Doing so, they contend to an ever-more-receptive audience, could weaken the Mexican cartels now profiting from U.S. pot sales, save billions in law enforcement costs, and generate billions more in tax revenue from one of the nation's biggest cash crops.

L.A. Times

The Obama administration is moving toward demilitarizing a health problem.  DEA apparently did not get the memo ...

The Obama administration is saying all the right things about the jumble of ineffective and vindictive laws, policies and practices that have made up this nation's so-called war on drugs. Shortly after he was confirmed, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he would halt Drug Enforcement Administration raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. Then the Justice Department urged Congress to eliminate the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity in convictions for dealing crack and powder cocaine, which imposed long prison terms on predominantly black defendants.

The most recent reassurance comes from the new drug czar, R. Gil Kerlikowske. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, Kerlikowske said it's time to retire the phrase "war on drugs." Good. It's as misguided as the policies it frames. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' ... people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country." These sensible pronouncements inspire hope that the administration is moving toward a more rational approach to drugs. There is much to do.

Drug Czar reaffirms support for clean syringes to reduce HIV and ending raids on marijuana dispensaries.

by Tony Newman

White House drug czar, Gill Kerlikowske called for an "end to the war on drugs" and said the drug problem in this country should be a public heath issue and not a criminal justice issue. His comments came during an interview with Gary Fields of the Wall Street Journal and appear in Thursday's edition.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product', people see a war as a war on them and we are not at war with people in this country," Kerlikowske told the Journal. He also told the Journal that the Obama Administration is likely to deal with drugs as a public health issue and would favor treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.

by Stephen C. Webster

Did you know that American authorities want to spray a toxic herbicide over 1.1 million acres of land on the US-Mexico border? Leave it to some pissed off Texans to throw a cog in that machine.  This, from the latest edition of Texas' most muckrakin' weekly, the Lone Star Iconoclast:

• Mexican cartels have set up operations in 230 American cities, he says
• Enforcement doesn't stop Americans from finding ways to get drugs
• Many other uses for the billions we spend in war on drugs

NEW YORK -- Here's something to think about:  How many police officers and sheriff's deputies are involved in investigating and solving crimes involving illegal drugs? And arresting and transporting and interrogating and jailing the suspects?

A decorated former Marine drill sergeant, Romans joined the department in 1996

In 1999, Romans received the department's highest honor, the Medal of Valor for helping save residents in a West Oakland fire.

We can make over 25,000 things with it. Farmers love it. Environmentalists love it. You can't get high from it. So why is it still illegal? 

By Dara Colwell

While Uncle Sam's scramble for new revenue sources has recently kicked up the marijuana debate -- to legalize and tax, or not? -- hemp's feasibility as a stimulus plan has received less airtime.

But with a North American market that exceeds $300 million in annual retail sales and continued rising demand, industrial hemp could generate thousands of sustainable new jobs, helping America to get back on track.

By Mary Beth Sheridan

MEXICO CITY -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Mexico on Wednesday with a blunt mea culpa, saying that decades of U.S. anti-narcotics policies have been a failure and have contributed to the explosion of drug violence south of the border.

"Clearly what we've been doing has not worked," Clinton told reporters on her plane at the start of her two-day trip, saying that U.S. policies on curbing drug use, narcotics shipments and the flow of guns have been ineffective.

U.S. drug use fuels border violence

Secretary of state in Mexico to bolster anti-narcotics cooperation

by Paula Jackson

Stop using Drugs Now!  Drug Use in our country is a matter of National Security.  If no one used illegal drugs then there would be no "Drug War".  Now, most of us on the side of sanity know that making all drugs legal, regulated, and taxed will take the drugs off the streets and into the light where we could shine a big bolt of economic power into education but reality kicks us in the head when we come against the wall of fear that chooses militarization over legalization and we just scream, "Geez Us What are You People Thinking".