Odds and ends

“bullet” Great headline: Christ to speak on war on drugs tonight [Thanks, Micah]
“bullet” Great editorial: U.S. should put an end to war on drugs, legalize pot

Interestingly, it’s not just the dope smokers in the park calling for legalized marijuana use. Conservative, progressive and libertarian intellectuals alike have argued that we ought to legalize marijuana. The Post’s editorial board has long called for an end to the war on pot.
Our opinion meshes, in this instance, with that of the late conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., who once argued that “the government should treat marijuana more or less the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and make it illegal only for children.”

“bullet” Great data: Plan Colombia and Beyond: A compendium of drug-war statistics
Clear evidence that our efforts to stamp out cocaine in Colombia and the Andes has been a colossal waste and failure.
WOLA has more in this report by John Walsh

Reducing the availability of drugs like cocaine has been a perennial goal of U.S. drug policy, in hopes that higher prices and lower purity would translate into less consumption. But since the early 1980s, cocaine prices have been falling, not rising, according to two comprehensive analyses, one from 2004 and the other from 2008. The 2008 study, which was recently made public by the Obama administration, shows that U.S. cocaine prices continued to fall through 2007, while purity remained high. The new data undermine well-publicized claims by George W. Bush administration officials that supply disruptions had achieved unprecedented cocaine shortages in the United States.