Prohibition: the gangster's best friend, the enemy of civil society

As drug violence spirals out of control in Mexico, a commission led by three former Latin American heads of state blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point.

"The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war," said former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in a conference call with reporters from Rio de Janeiro. "We have to move from this approach to another one."

[...]

The three former presidents who head the commission are political conservatives who have confronted in their home countries the violence and corruption that accompany drug trafficking.

The report warned that the U.S. style anti-drug strategy was putting the region's fragile democratic institutions at risk and corrupting "judicial systems, governments, the political system and especially the police forces."

The report comes as drug violence is engulfing Mexico, which has become the key transit point for cocaine traffic to the U.S. Decapitation of rival drug traffickers has become common as cartels try to intimidate one another.

Latin American Panel Calls Drug War A Failure (Wall Street Journal, 11 Feb 2009)

It's a [bleep] valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing

The Blagojevich tapes, animated. ;-)

Favorite bit:

(offscreen voice of Patti Blagojevich): Is that the Cubs? Hold up that [bleep] Cubs [bleep]. [Bleep] them.

Governor Blagojevich, meekly: Yes, Patti, I'm doing that now.

Hat tip: Greg.

The murder of innocents and the War on Drugs

It sure is a good thing that we've got the brave officers of the Atlanta Police Department protecting us from the scourge of Dangerous Drugs by, among other things, gunning down a 92 year-old woman while botching the execution of a fraudulently obtained search warrant... and then planting evidence to cover their asses.

While an innocent, elderly woman lay bleeding, handcuffed, and dying on the floor of her own home due to their malfeasance, these animals went about planting drugs to implicate her, and concocting a story to save their own hides. Every case these officers ever worked on needs to be reopened. And that's just getting started. A police department that could produce these three dirty cops, and allow them to operate, is a department that has almost certainly produced many more. It would be awfully coincidental if the only three bad drug cops at APD all happened to be working together this particular night, and happened to get caught on this particular raid.

I certainly feel a lot safer. Don't you?

[Kathryn] Johston Timeline (Radley Balko writing at Reason's Hit and Run Blog, April 30, 2007)