As public attitudes surrounding the war on drugs continue to evolve, we’ll begin to see more of this type of thing:

Containing parts of Kirkland, Redmond, Woodinville, and points east, the 45th Legislative District is hardly a hotbed of radicalism. But the two candidates for one of the district's two House seats share a position well out of the political mainstream: They both advocate wholesale changes to the War on Drugs.

In his time away from the capital, incumbent State Rep. Roger Goodman (D-Kirkland) heads the King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project, where he works on moving drug policy's focus from crime and punishment to public health. His challenger, Toby Nixon (R-Kirkland), who held the seat from 2002 to 2006 before leaving to run for the state Senate (he lost his bid for an open seat to Eric Oemig), has spoken out in defense of Washington's medical marijuana law and pushed a bill requiring performance audits of drug-enforcement policies. [Seattle Weekly]

So will the candidates start arguing over who’s going to do more to end the drug war?

Noting that "some have observed that it's unfortunate that we're running against each other," Nixon adds that he's not sure he and Goodman have any disagreements on drug policy reform. But he wishes Goodman had followed his lead and pushed more drug policy reform bills as a legislator.

There you have it folks! The first candidate for public office to ever get called out for not trying hard enough to reform drug policy. This is not a coincidence, this is a sign of the times. It won’t be over tomorrow -- we’d be foolish to think that -- but we are entering a phase where we’ll begin to see and hear the drug policy debate in new forums. Once reform enters the mainstream political curriculum, the tone changes, the pot jokes start sounding immature and the things that actually matter can finally be discussed.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)

Here’s another completely odd phenomenon discovered in the laboratory of drug prohibition:

It's a mystery that has got British law enforcement officials and others across the planet scratching their heads. Put bluntly, enough heroin to supply the world's demand for years has simply disappeared.
…
For the past three years, production has been running at almost twice the level of global demand. The numbers just don't add up. [BBC]

Get it? Afghanistan is producing far more heroin than the entire world even uses. So where the hell did it go?

The answer is easy. It’s in a massive underground refrigerator. Seriously, that’s exactly where it is. These guys are storing enough heroin to survive a nuclear holocaust. If we killed every poppy plant on the planet tomorrow, they wouldn’t run out for years. These heroin barons aren’t the nicest people and we’re making them rich with our silly drug war. Anyone who still thinks flamethrowers and helicopter patrols are going to solve the heroin problem needs to chill for a minute and think about what’s happening here.