Pete Guither and Dave Borden already mentioned it, but I just can’t get enough of this quote from the Wall Street Journal:

"If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence," a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence "because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now."

So let me get this straight. According to the U.S. government:

No violence = drug war is failing
Intense violence = drug war is going well

So when do we win the drug war then? When everyone’s dead?

Duh…

Lott said his investigators couldn't find enough evidence to charge anyone — including Phelps — who attended the party with any crime. [The State]

Um yeah, it’s kind of hard to convict a guy of smoking a bong at a party 4 months ago. That’s just one of many reasons that literally everyone in the world thought this was a terrible idea. Lott’s press conference was supremely lame, as he played the role of a valiant public servant caught in an epic "damned if you do, damned if you don’t" conundrum. As if anybody was going to give him a hard time for failing to launch a massive investigation against a misdemeanor marijuana suspect who couldn’t even be legally extradited because the charge was so petty.

Anyhow, it’s probably safe to say the Michael Phelps mega-controversy will likely begin fizzling out from here, unless he gets caught free-basing bubble hash on YouTube.

Looks like someone forgot to tell DEA about the economic crisis:

WASHINGTON — The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration spent more than $123,000 to charter a private jet to fly to Bogota, Colombia, last fall instead of taking one of the agency's 106 planes.

The DEA paid a contractor an additional $5,380 to arrange Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart's trip last Oct. 28-30 with an outside company.

The DEA scheduled the trip as the nation was reeling from the worst economic crisis in decades and the national debt was climbing toward $10 trillion. Three weeks later, lawmakers slammed chief executive officers from three automakers for flying to Washington in private jets as Congress debated whether to bail out the auto industry. [McClatchy]

Of course, a DEA official assures us that this was all necessitated by a security threat:

Brown said the administrator couldn't have taken a commercial flight because she and other officials who were traveling with her were under "specific" threat in Colombia at the time. He wouldn't reveal details about the threat, saying only that it was of a "sensitive law-enforcement nature." He added that the threat prompted him to conclude that "a government aircraft would provide a level of security not available on a commercial aircraft."

Makes sense, but…

A U.S. official in Colombia, however, said that officials there weren't aware of any threat against Leonhart other than the general insecurity in the country due to the drug trade.

Interesting. Seriously, how much longer is going to take the Obama Administration to replace Michele Leonhart? Crap like this is nothing compared to the medical marijuana raids, but it serves as yet another reminder that DEA is a rogue agency that just does whatever it wants all the time.

It appears competition is bringing the price for medical marijuana down. Hopefully the changes in policy by President Obama will increase production so prices will keep going down.

Peter Guither routinely dissects drug war illogic in the public discourse over at the Drug WarRant blog. Last week he highlighted some illustratively blind comments in the Wall Street Journal by an unnamed senior US official who actually argued that increased violence in Mexico is a sign of progress in the drug war:

U.S. law-enforcement officials -- as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico -- say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing. "If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence," a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence "because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now."

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb followed up:

The cops wanted a new metric by which to judge their success -- one that would not penalize them for an increased murder rate that necessarily follows from doing their job, i.e. eliminating a major drug trafficker.

Pete pointed out that Goldfarb and the official are "confusing success in an action with success in policy." Sure, we can take out any given drug trafficking organization if we try hard enough, but if the result is that different traffickers supply the same amount of drugs to people, while tearing the country apart at greater and greater levels with their fighting, it's poor strategy. And since people are dying in the Mexican drug wars at a rapid pace -- 8,000 have been killed in the past two years since President Calderón ratcheted things up by sending in the military -- I'd say yes, we absolutely should stop it, ASAP. If we're going to be at all logical about things, that is.

How can congress get away with all this unconstitutional legislation with impunity?