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I'm still flabbergasted by a friend saying that he was "morally opposed to marijuana use".

As a child, my folks took me to see the magnificent trees in Sequoia National Park and I'll never forget it as long as I live. It's a precious ecosystem, housing the largest trees in the world as well as countless other unique plant-life not found anywhere else on earth. Not surprisingly, it's also a great place to grow marijuana and that could soon become its downfall:

In Sequoia National Park, $1 million has been spent since 2006 on marijuana plantation cleanup alone, and the damage done to Crystal Cave will be felt for years to come, said the park spokeswoman, Adrienne Freeman.

"We are continually discovering new species in that cave, and we are letting Mexican cartels threaten to wipe that out," she said. [CNN]

She's damn right we're letting them do it. We've surrendered the fate of irreplaceable national treasures to these drug traffickers, simply because we won't allow responsible Americans to produce their own marijuana on private property. The consequences of our failure are catastrophic, yet the solution is painfully simple.

It's really amazing to watch the police, the forest service, and the press just cringing and whining about this awful problem, without uttering a word about how we're going to save our forests from imminent destruction. They seriously don’t have a clue. You can read any of the dozens of recently published stories on this topic without seeing anyone even attempt to figure it out. Their only idea is to keep pulling up pot plants, as the growers plant ever more to ensure that some survive.

Fortunately, there exists one perfect solution to this problem. And it offers far more than the salvation of our precious wilderness. When we fix our marijuana laws, I guarantee you, we will solve problems we didn’t even know we had.

Via Radley Balko, here's another grave tragedy that we can all thank the drug war for making possible. The victim clearly freaked out when police confronted him, but I'm not at all convinced that he understood who they were. They were in plain clothes in an unmarked vehicle jumping out on a guy who'd just drawn money from an ATM. Why would he knowingly try to evade police when he didn’t have anything illegal on him?

It's one more dreadful tragedy that just didn't have to happen. Police pulling guns on harmless people should be a rare event, but it's not. And when it happens, it's almost always the result of some crazy drug investigation with more questions than answers.

When experts like Mark Kleiman say that legalization doesn’t add up, are they factoring events like this into the equation?

Another problem with having laws against certain types of plants is that police don't know anything about plants. The subtleties of botany are inevitably lost on them and the results are amusing, yet tragic:

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Dutch police who mowed down what they thought were illicit marijuana plants were red-faced today when it emerged they’d ruined a research group’s giant, officially sanctioned field of harmless hemp.

Police proudly announced Wednesday that they’d found more than 47,000 cannabis plants, with an estimated street value of nearly €4.5 million ($6.45 million) concealed in a corn field in the Flevoland province east of Amsterdam.

They mowed down half the plants only to be informed they were the property of Wageningen University and Research Center, a respected agricultural school. [Boston Herald]

That sucks. Sadly, I suspect that the potential for fiascos like this goes a long way towards explaining why law enforcement continues to incoherently oppose hemp cultivation here in the U.S. Police just don't want to be bothered with distinguishing one from the other. If it looks like weed, they'd rather break out a machete than a field manual. It's understandable if you don’t care about, like, freedom and stuff.

Instead of banning hemp, therefore, I propose we just legalize all forms of cannabis and make things a lot easier for everyone.

by Bernd Debusmann Jr. Mexican drug trafficking organizations make billions each year trafficking illegal drugs into the United States, profiting enormously from the prohibitionist drug policies of the US government. Since Mexican president Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and called the armed forces into the fight against the so-called cartels, prohibition-related violence has killed over 12,000 people, with a death toll of over 4,000 so far in 2009. The increasing militarization of the drug war and the arrest of several high- profile drug traffickers have failed to stem the flow of drugs -- or the violence -- whatsoever. The Merida initiative, which provides $1.4 billion over three years for the US to assist the Mexican government with training, equipment and intelligence, has so far failed to make a difference. Here are a few of the latest developments in Mexico's drug war: Thursday, August 28 -According to a study released by Mexican non-profit group Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, Ciudad Juarez has become the most violent city on earth. With 130 murders per 100,000 people in 2008, Ciudad Juarez was considerably more violent than other cities with a high murder rate, such as Caracas, Venezuela, Medellin, Colombia, and New Orleans. The murder rate has gone up in 2009, with an average of 250 people being killed in Ciudad Juarez each month. Friday, August 29 -Five police officers and possibly one gunman were killed during a running gun battle in the state of Jalisco. The encounter began when a convoy of seven vehicles carrying at least 30 gunmen approached state policemen on a local highway. Four policemen were killed in the initial battle and the fifth was killed as police chased the assailants. -The aide of a Mexican federal agent who had been investigating the death of a crime reporter was found dead in Ciudad Juarez. Pablo Pasillas, 33, was secretary to the federal agent appointed to investigate the November killing of Armando Gutierrez, a crime reporter for El Diario. The first agent assigned to the case was shot dead outside his home in Ciudad Juarez. Sunday, August 30 - The defense lawyer for a convicted drug trafficker was found stabbed to death in his home in Toluca. America Delgado, 80, was the defense attorney for Tijuana cartel boss Benjamin Arellano Felix, who is now serving a 22-year sentence in prison. Delgado was found with his throat slit and with several stab wounds. The killing comes less than the month after another attorney for high profile drug traffickers was killed. Lawyer Silvia Raquenel Villanueva was gunned down in Monterrey on August 9th. Monday, August 31 -Four men have been arrested on suspicion of having committed 211 drug-related murders. Authorities have said that the four hitmen are tied to the enforcement arm of the Juarez cartel. Three of the men were presented to the media on Saturday in Mexico City. Omar Castro Rivera, 28, is accused of 93 homicides. Edgar Flores Martinez, 30, is accused of 87 homicides, and Cristian Enrique Franco Franco is accused of 22. A fourth suspect, Hector Armando Alcibar Wong, aka “The Korean”, 21, was already in custody and is accused of 15 homicides. The men told authorities that most of their murder victims were involved in drug-dealing, extortion, and other crimes in Ciudad Juarez. Authorities also said that the three men confessed to the killing of five motorcyclists on January 25th in Ciudad Juarez. The five dead were reportedly killed because they were members of the “AA” or Assassin Artists, a rival to the Juarez cartel. The group also confessed to the June 11 killing of five men in a motel. -Eight people were killed in the seaside town of Navolato, in the state of Sinaloa. The killings occurred when at least four heavily armed gunmen in a pickup truck began to fire into a crowd of partygoers. The dead included two boys, aged 15 and 16, and two females, aged 18 and 25. The shootings may be part of a recent wave of apparent vigilante attacks by armed squads suspected of working for drug cartels or the police. Two of the victims of the attack had criminal records for car theft. More than 30 carjackers and other low-level criminals have been murdered in Sinaloa in the last few months, according to local journalists. Tuesday, September 1 -The United States has released $214 million of the $1.4 billion in anti-drug aid promised to Mexico in 2007. The money is intended to fund equipment and training of Mexican security forces. Some detection gear has already been sent to Mexico during the summer, and a delivery of five Bell helicopters is due to be delivered to the Mexican army in the fall. Separately, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border announced an agreement to improve cross-border communications and the creation of cross-border voice and data transmission networks for law enforcement. -In Ciudad Juarez a body was found hanging from a fence in a nightclub parking lot. Eight people were murdered in the same location several weeks ago. Wedneday, September 2 -17 people were killed when a dozen gunmen burst into a drug rehabilitation clinic in Ciudad Juarez. The 17 patients killed were lined up before being shot. Cartel gunmen have targeted drug rehab clinics several time in the past, accusing them of protecting rival gang members. In a separate incident, gunmen killed the deputy police chief of Michoacan. Jose Manuel Revueltas, 38, and two bodyguards, were killed after their vehicle was attacked by heavily armed gunmen just blocks away from his office in Morelia. Total reported body count for the week: 149 Total reported body count for the year: 4,736 Read last issue's Mexico drug war report here.

You lazy ass pot heads don't do anything but complain and cower behind your cheesy ideals!! Get off your ASSES and do something real!

Anyone in Maryland who thinks the problem is solved should read this. This isn't about politics and it isn’t about pot. These are real people who need the freedom to treat their illnesses in the way that works for them, without having to worry about the cops getting involved.

Even people who still don’t understand medical marijuana should be opposed to spending tax dollars dragging cancer patients through the court system.

According to Esquire, it may be as many as 15,000. It's awfully hard to calculate with any certainty, but the author's point is to demonstrate that Mexico's frightening drug war death toll isn't the only one worth discussing. Americans are also paying a great price for our disastrous drug policy and it's time to take a closer look at how those numbers add up and how ending the drug war can bring them back down.

Predictably, Mark Kleiman has a problem with the article's pro-legalization angle and expresses his doubts about the 15,000 figure. My question for Kleiman is this: if that number is wrong, then what's the correct number? How should it be calculated? The bottom line here is that people are getting killed constantly in the war on drugs and we're trying to do something about it.

Kleiman hypocritically attacks both sides in the drug war debate for failing to use what he considers "factually and logically sound arguments," while simultaneously insisting – without any proof -- that legalization will create catastrophic spikes in drug use. He could be right, but we don’t really have any way to find out other than by doing exactly what he says we shouldn’t do. Personally, my gut instinct is that Kleiman is partially right, but that the benefits of reducing the collective harms of prohibition will decisively outweigh the new harms he anticipates. Again, there's only one way to find out.

Moreover, it's just crazy to accept the current body count based on the assumption that alternatives can't possibly work. LEAP's Neill Franklin nails this point:

But what about the argument that drugs will spread like wildfire if we don't keep bringing down the hammer?

"First, there's no concrete study to support such a belief — it's all completely speculation," Franklin insists. "So in my left hand I have all this speculation about what may happen to addiction rates, and then I look at my other hand and I see all these dead bodies that are actually fact, not speculation. And you're going to ask me to weigh the two? Second, if the addiction rate does go up, I'm going to have a lot of live addicts that I can cure. The direction we're going in now, I've got a lot of dead bodies."

Regardless of how legalization might impact addiction rates, it's just a fact that people are presently getting shot to death over drugs on a daily basis. If you think it has to be that way, you're wrong. People do not have to be murdered in the streets constantly. We can change that, we really can, and then we can do some more number crunching and decide if regulating drug sales is worth it or not.