McClatchy report: Mexican pot growing hits new high

 Cultivation, Marijuana Law
Sep 052010
 

CORRE COYOTE, Mexico — Times are good for the dope growers of the western Sierra Madre mountains. The army eradication squads that once hacked at the illicit marijuana fields have been diverted by the drug war that’s raging elsewhere in Mexico. The military’s retreat has delighted farmers who are sowing and reaping marijuana. Cultivation in Mexico soared 35 percent last year and is now higher than at any time in nearly two decades, the State Department says. It’s also been a boon for Mexico’s powerful organized-crime groups, Tim Johnson reports for McClatchy Newspapers in the [...]

Column: Prop. 19 attacks Mexican drug violence

 Legalization, Marijuana Law, Opinion
Sep 052010
 

Héctor Aguilar Camín is a historian, a novelist and the publisher and editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos. Jorge G. Castañeda was Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003 and teaches at New York University. Their column endorsing Proposition 19 as a powerful tool to fight Mexican drug violence appears in the Washington Post. ============ MEXICO CITY — On Nov. 2, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, deciding whether to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. If the initiative passes, it won’t just be momentous for California; it may, at long last, offer [...]

London columnist: Drug prohibition fuels violence in Mexico

 Legalization, Marijuana Law, Opinion
Aug 272010
 

Bud’s note: London Independent columnist Johann Hari offers this stinging indictment of drug-war violence in the Huffington Post. To many people, the “war on drugs” sounds like a metaphor, like the “war on poverty.” It is not. It is being fought with tanks and submachine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death-toll in Tijuana — one of the front-lines of this war — is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of seventy mutilated corpses was found [...]

Lawnmowers fail to cut mustard for pot smugglers at border

 Law Enforcement, Pot-pourri
Apr 082010
 

SAN YSIDRO — The latest trend in smuggling pot across the border at San Ysidro appears to be stuffing it inside lawnmowers. For the second time in recent weeks, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports, inspectors at the San Ysidro port of entry have discovered marijuana packed into lawmowers from which the blades have been removed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers found Thursday’s load inside two lawnmowers in the bed of a 1996 Dodge Dakota pickup driven by a Riverside resident who attempted to drive across the border about 5:30 a.m. Drug-sniffing dogs alerted officers [...]

Three tons of pot seized at Cal-Mex border

 Courts, Law Enforcement
Nov 302009
 

CALEXICO – Border authorities announced Sunday that they seized more than 6,000 pounds of marijuana with a street value of $5.9 million and arrested the driver of a truck where the drugs were found mingled with a shipment of door knobs. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers made the seizure Friday at the Calexico Port of Entry’s secondary cargo inspection area, according to this brief story from the San Diego Union-Tribune, which is also posted in its entirety here. A canine team alerted officers about the possibility of drugs inside a 1998 trailer. Officers found [...]

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