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This article on a marijuana decriminalization effort in New Hampshire provides a useful case study in the utter confusion and desperation of the anti-pot peanut gallery:

…Exeter Police Chief Richard Kane, among others, is adamantly opposed. "If we reduce the penalty for small amounts of marijuana, it will eventually lead to legalization and I think that's heading in the wrong direction," he said last week.

Nashua Police Chief Donald Conley also said it would be a mistake to take the sting out of the law. [Boston Globe]

So the Police Chief begins by arguing that we must go around stinging people for possessing pot. But when reform advocates argue that too many young lives are being derailed by harsh punishments for petty offenses, Conley completely changes his tune:

But Conley said it is rare for first-time offenders to get jail time for possession of small amounts of marijuana.

"As far as someone getting arrested and their lives being ruined, I don't think that's the case," he said. "Employers are more forgiving in this day and age, and police prosecutors frequently reduce marijuana cases down to violations…"

Wait, so should we be stinging people or not? He begins by defending aggressive sanctions and ends by claiming the sanctions aren't aggressive. The contradiction is transparent and embarrassing.

It is, in fact, not at all uncommon to hear defenders of harsh marijuana laws speak approvingly of the fact that most offenders avoid jail time. Thus, it is not necessarily the practice of ruining lives for marijuana which they crave, but rather the discretion to do so should the urge happen to arise. Meanwhile, millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans are branded as criminals so that people like Chief Conley can live out their authoritarian fantasies.

U.S.-sponsored efforts to fumigate Colombian coca crops have utterly failed to prevent cocaine production. But they have been very effective at destroying Colombia's national parks:

Leftist rebels, right-wing paramilitaries, and narcos that control the billion-dollar cocaine trade have invaded the 2.5-million-acre Macarena, laying waste to much of it to plant coca. Most of Colombia's 48 other national parks and nature reserves are suffering similar fates. Chased from more accessible sites by U.S.-sponsored aerial fumigation, coca growers relentlessly clear forests knowing that they are beyond the reach of the U.S.-Colombian fleet of planes because spraying of the parks is prohibited by law. [Los Angeles Times]

So what's next? Are we gonna spray crop killers on this precious irreplaceable ecosystem? Doing that will just force the drug lords to burrow deeper, leaving an ever-expanding trail of flaming destruction in their tracks.

Let's face it, rainforests are awesome. They are filled with jaguars, anacondas, and large spiders that eat chickens. I don't know what kinds of animals live in Colombian forests specifically, but I'm sure there are some wicked cool creatures in there that are worth saving.

Unfortunately, there's nothing in this entire LA Times article that even vaguely resembles a plan for stopping drug traffickers from completely destroying everything. The Colombians' best idea is literally to ask that people please stop doing cocaine, a plan so useless it isn't worth the trees that died to print it out. We are on an irreversible trajectory towards the total permanent destruction of many of the world's most unique natural resources as long as current efforts to thwart illicit drug production continue. That is just a fact.

This would all be a terrible price to pay to get rid of cocaine, except that we haven't even come close to accomplishing that and we never will. Invaluable natural resources are being destroyed for nothing. Only by ending the drug war immediately can we even begin to address this rapidly expanding ecological crisis.

That was the question for the day's discussion at the third of three drug awareness conferences held in Vancouver,B.C. Canada. Today's (Wed.Feb.27'08) meeting was a breath of fresh air as the prohibition movement and it's proponents finally got the message and went to form their own group somewhere.