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Six More Drug War Disgraces

Drug warriors crash the party when Barney Frank announces his marijuana decriminalization bill.
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Police are awarded medals for terrorizing and nearly killing an innocent family in a botched drug raid.
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Mexico's US-funded war on drugs isn't protecting children, it's getting them killed in the streets.
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Pete Guither has a good, though depressing, post covering various interesting drug war trials taking place this week.
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Deputy drug czar compares smoking pot to having sex with 10-year-old girls
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I linked it yesterday, but can't stress enough the importance of 20/20's report on the Rachel Hoffman murder.
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Everywhere you look, the drug war is perverting our politics, ruining peaceful lives, wasting tax dollars, and even killing innocent children. But don't look away. That's what the authors of this grand catastrophe are hoping we'll do, what so many of our fellow citizens have already done, and what we will never do no matter how much it hurts to witness such hatred and abuse at the hands of our government. If these are the things they're willing to do right before our eyes, imagine what could happen if we turn away even for a moment.

U.S. Drug War Funding Supports Human Rights Violations in Mexico

Only a month after President Bush signed a $465 million drug war aid package for Mexico, we're learning more about the types of brutal activities our tax dollars will be paying for:

OJINAGA, Mexico (AP) — This hardscrabble Mexican border town welcomed 400 soldiers when they arrived four months ago to stop a wave of drug violence that brought daytime gunbattles to its main street.

But then the soldiers themselves turned violent, townspeople say, ransacking homes and even torturing people.

The frustration boiled over this week. More than 1,000 people marched through the streets carrying signs begging President Felipe Calderon for protection from his own troops.

Unsurprisingly, the Mexican government was quick to make light of the growing problem:

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission says it has documented more than 600 cases of abuse since Calderon sent 20,000 soldiers across the nation to take back territory controlled by drug lords.

Mexico's attorney general argues the cases are isolated incidents.

Unfortunately, human rights violations in the war on drugs are anything but isolated. They are endemic and inevitable. Horrible stories of misconduct emerge wherever drug laws are enforced. You can count on that, just as you can count on the people responsible for preventing such abuses to dismiss them and defend the policies under which they proliferate.

solution to the immigration 'problem'

since the numbers of people under the control of the criminal justice system is now near seven million i believe there is enough to start a new movement to counteract the issue of illegal aliens in ou