Budgets/Taxes/Economics

Mexican President Felipe Calderón staked his political reputation on doing battle with the drug cartels. Now, with prohibition-related violence at record levels and violent common crime also on the rise, he is looking for more money to save his legacy.

Who profits from drug prohibition? With this article we begin our occasional series on Vested Interests of Prohibition, and we begin with a law enforcement establishment grown fat off drug war bounty.

A former Navy officer and drug fighter turned drug reformer is running for the state House of Representatives in Connecticut. He's calling for safe injection sites, opiate maintenance, and taxed and regulated marijuana sales, and he could use your help.

Marijuana is big business in the Netherlands -- a conservative estimate says that the government collects $600 million a year in tax revenues from the coffee shops.

Although the Bush administration has tried repeatedly to zero out funding for the Justice Department grant program that funds state and local anti-drug task forces, Congress keeps trying to put it back. Last week, the Senate voted to restore more than $900 million in funds in the FY 2009 budget, but there's a long way to go yet.

The Bush administration's proposed 2009 budget includes some significant cuts in drug treatment, prevention, and recovery spending. A chorus of critics, including some former federal drug fighters, say there has to be a better way.

California's prison system is the nation's second largest, behind only the federal prison system. Now, an initiative that would dramatically expand Proposition 36-style "treatment not jail" programs, as well as other systemic reforms, is headed for the November ballot.

Mexican soldiers poured into Reynosa and other border towns in the state of Tamaulipas last month in response to a wave of drug prohibition-related violence. They haven't stopped the violence, but they have put the screws to some sectors of the local economy and committed some human rights violations. Few observers there or across the river think the answer lies in Washington's proposed massive anti-drug aid package.

Even as law enforcement and its allies fight a rear-guard effort to restore lost 2008 funding for the grant program that funds state and local drug task forces, the Bush administration is proposing to cut it again in the 2009 budget.

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) has proposed a tax on illegal drugs as part of his budget proposal. $3.50 a gram for marijuana might be -- if it were legal, at least -- but $200 a gram for cocaine!?