Politics Outside US

Life-saving equipment, including a special extraction device, is now sitting on the floor inside the Boulder Emergency Squad because delivery to Mexico faces setbacks due to drug traffickers. The items were supposed to be delivered to Mante, Mexico, one of Boulder’s sister cities where the need for the gear is great. Delivery is impossible at the moment as the squad is being told that the traffickers have taken over many of the roads between the border and the city.

The head of Venezuela’s narcotics agency, Nestor Reverol, denied allegations made by one of the world’s top drug traffickers that he had stolen his money and used some of it to buy a $2 million home. Walid Makled, arrested in Colombia in August, alleged in two TV interviews that Reverol took over his businesses worth as much as $70 million annually after he fled Venezuela, where he is wanted on charges of drug trafficking and murder. Makled said that before fleeing Venezuela he had retrieved videos, receipts and other evidence to back up his allegations.

Prohibition-caused threats and violence by drug trafficking organizations are preventing some government oil workers from reaching installations in northern Mexico and costing state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos about $350,000 every day in lost production. That amounts to about $10.5 million per month, or about 2.3 percent of Mexico's $450 million per month average in monthly natural gas revenues.

Around 300 people have abandoned the town of Ciudad Mier, fleeing drug prohibition violence from traffickers who were threatening residents. The town, one of numerous cities on borderlands believed to be in dispute by two rival organizations, is a stone's throw from the border of Texas. More than 60 people have been killed in the town of about 6,000 people this year.

Last week's killing of the top drug lord in the Gulf Cartel marked the second takedown of a major capo in Mexico in a little over two months. Experts in Mexico and the United States say the strategy has a real downside.

Elaborate methods of smuggling cocaine and a record number of new unregulated drugs are challenging drug control policies in Europe. Traffickers are increasingly using exports such as clothes, plastics and fertilizers to smuggle cocaine base which is then extracted in clandestine laboratories.

Drug traffickers are moving drugs into India via terminally ill patients -- mostly women from foreign countries. Most of them go scot free on humanitarian grounds.

In a government effort to curb what is perhaps their nation's best-known vice, Dutch households will soon receive marijuana-scented scratch-and-sniff cards to help them detect illegal urban cannabis plantations in their vicinity. According to Rotterdam authorities, over 30,000 cards are being distributed this week to help citizens identify marijuana's pungent odor. Each of the 8-by-4 inch cards, which bear the slogan "Assist in combatting cannabis plantations," contain two boxes which can be scratched to release the cannabis scent, along with the telephone number of a local police precinct.

It was another bloody weekend in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where at least 20 people were killed in drug prohibition violence.