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Mexico Decriminalizes Small-Scale Drug Possession
Professor_Quail notes an AP story that begins, "Mexico enacted a controversial law Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging free government treatment for drug dependency. The law sets out maximum 'personal use' amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution when the law goes into effect Friday." An official in the attorney general's office said, "This is not legalization, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty... for a practice that was already in place." In 2006, the US criticized a similar bill that had no provisions for mandatory treatment, and the then-president sent it back to Congress for reconsideration.
With some positive results. Drug dealers still go to jail, but addicts go to treatment centers. Their main goal was to reduce deaths due to overdose which, five years later dropped as well as users infected by dirty needles. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
As a fellow nerd I have to tell you that some critical parts of our computer technology these days was built with the help of these 'drugs', or more clearly psychedelics and more precisely LSD. See: http://open.salon.com/blog/hal_m/2009/07/09/lsd_inventor_hofmanns_letter_to_steve_jobs and http://heroux.blogspot.com/2006/03/this-is-your-computer-on-lsd.html for a couple of good starting points for you too look at.
What I hear from it's a great way to boost you way of analytic, mathematical and engineering way of thinking. Now, I'm not saying we should promote use of any of these substances, but I'm saying we should aknowledge them and use them in a controlled way for the benefit of human kind. Psychedelics can unlock huge potentials in human beings, why are we denying this still ? The native people of different regions of the world have known this for centuries. Too bad we are still being led by medical companies and other huge colloborations of humans who like their materialistic ways of lifes too much to really let the human race take off.
GeoKone.NET
The firepower the cartels wield is not smuggled in from the US. 87% of the firearms Mexico asks the ATF to locate, are traced to the US -- but they only request that sort of thing on a small percent of the firearms they seize, 10%-ish I believe. Basically, they only request it when they have reason to believe the guns came from the US.
The M16s? The grenades? Those aren't being smuggled across the border unless the government is doing it. They're not, incidentally, most those sorts of things are sold to the cartels from the Mexican army (yay for corruption!). AKs and other soviet weaponry obviously is a lot easier to find on black markets, and that's not smuggled from the US either.
When you're making the kind of money the cartels were, you're not going out and buying semi-autos or hunting rifles, you're buying military hardware. And you don't buy that sort of thing in the US.
Other than that, though, yep. Clearly has something to do with the violence that's been going on down there, whether or not it works I think depends on how splintered the cartels actually are. Honestly would not be surprised if only certain cartels were targetted -- it's happened before, but I believe that involved police and not the mexican miltary.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
bolsters the notion that keeping 1 in 25 Americans in prison
That's 1 in 100 adults, or about 1 in 130 Americans. Not that this is a good number, but it's not nearly so high as 1 in 25.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?