Policing

The Chronicle reviews a journalistic treatment of the Mara Salvatrucha gang and an anthropological treatment of a group of homeless middle-aged heroin addicts. We found one much more satisfying than the other.

Since cannabis went back to being a Class B drug in England, London police have been ticketing and fining marijuana users like crazy. But funny thing -- they aren't bothering to pay the fines.

With US and NATO policies for dealing with the Afghan poppy group undergoing quite radical shifts -- giving up on eradication, treating traffickers as terrorists -- Gretchen Peters' exposé of the links between the traffic in prohibited drugs and the Taliban and Al Qaeda couldn't be more timely or more informative.

Who woulda thunk it? Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who never saw a border that didn't need a fence, says it's time to talk about drug legalization.

Lives are being lost because when someone ODs on drugs, friends fearful of arrest of themselves or the victim hesitate to seek help. In 2007, New Mexico became the first state to pass a Good Samaritan law protecting people calling for help in ODs. This year, similar bills are popping up around the country.

Some 7,500 Mexican soldiers are flooding into Ciudad Juárez in a bid to blunt prohibition-related violence that has left about 2,000 people dead there since January 2008. Meanwhile, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff is headed to Mexico for talks on increased cooperation between the two neighbors.

Just a couple of weeks after dishing out a few billion dollars more for the drug war in the emergency stimulus bill, Congress is at it again in the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill. More money for Byrne JAG grants, more money for Plan Mexico, and just a tiny bit less for Plan Colombia.

The economic stimulus bill will be stimulating the drug war, too. There's more than $3 billion in there for law enforcement, and much of that is destined for enforcing drug prohibition.

In one of the few actions that won it kudos from drug reformers and civil rights groups, the Bush administration tried for years to zero out the Byrne grant program, which funds multi-jurisdictional anti-drug task forces. Now, as part of the economic stimulus bill, Congress wants to give it more money than ever.

President-elect Obama met with Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Monday. Mexico's drug wars were high on the agenda, but it seems unlikely, given Obama's list of pressing issues, that Mexico will get any higher priority than it has in recent years.