Legislative Update XXI

The House of Representatives passed funding for high-speed rail projects, lifted a stupid ban on using taxpayer dollars for needle exchange programs for intravenous drug users, and passed a measure to require PAYGO, or "pay-as-you-go" budget rules. House committees approved bills to Puerto Ricans decide their island's political status and to shift student loan lending from FFELP to the Department of Education's Direct Loan program instead per President Obama's request.

The Senate approved a defense spending bill that includes the F-22 and alternate F-35 engine cuts that President Obama and the Pentagon wanted. The Senate also rejected an amendment to would have let people carry hidden guns in 48 states if they have a concealed weapon permit in any one of them. Differences now need to be resolved with the House.

As for health care, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Senate will miss the August deadline for a vote on legislation and it will be postponed until September. The House may vote next week (or not), but work is still ongoing. The White House isn't happy, of course, but still hopeful.

GAO shows our gun laws are weak

Ridiculous:

People on the government’s terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the last five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases 9 times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, according to a new government report.

In one case, a person on the list was able to buy more than 50 pounds of explosives.

The new statistics, compiled in a report from the Government Accountability Office that is scheduled for public release next week, draw attention to an odd divergence in federal law: people placed on the government’s terrorist watch list can be stopped from getting on a plane or getting a visa, but they cannot be stopped from buying a gun.

Gun purchases must be approved unless federal officials can find some other disqualification of the would-be buyer, like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or a drug addict.

“This is a glaring omission, and it’s a security issue,” Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat who requested the study, said in an interview.

Sen. Lautenberg introduced legislation in 2007 that would have given the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists, but it was stalled by the NRA, of course. He will re-introduce it on Monday and hopefully Democrats will have the balls to take it up, but I doubt it. There's few lobbies they fear more than the gun lobby:

Can new evidence that high-powered US firearms are fueling Mexican drug violence change the political course of gun control in Washington?

Not likely, a number of gun experts say.

The Government Accountability Office information that 87 percent of seized guns given to US authorities by Mexican officials come from the US shouldn't come as a surprise, says Bill Vizzard, a criminologist at the California State University in Sacramento. "We're the largest legal gun market in the world."

Many of the firearms used to kill thousands of police and government officials in Mexico come from gun shops and gun shows in Southwest border states, the report says...

"Washington has to pacify the Mexican government, and, rightfully, the Mexican government is pointing at the US saying, 'You guys keep talking about our drugs going to the US. What about your guns coming down here?' " says Vizzard, adding, "And they legitimately have a beef."

After the landmark Heller decision last year – in which the Supreme Court affirmed Second Amendment gun rights – Democratic leadership has stepped back from pressing the gun control issue, at least at the national level. While popular in urban centers, gun control laws can have electoral implications in rural hunting states where Democrats made huge gains last election.

If anything, gun rights have expanded on the heels of last year's Heller decision. The Democrat-dominated Congress this year agreed to allow Americans to carry concealed weapons into national parks and wildlife refuges.

But the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence hopes that today's Congressional hearings on the GAO report will have some effect on efforts to close the so-called "gun show loophole" where guns can be sold without background checks.

"The extremist gun lobby should no longer be permitted to dictate our nation's gun policy," said Brady Center president Paul Helmke, in a statement.

Amen. If Republicans and Democrats really want to really be tough when it comes to the war on terrorism and the war on drugs, they need to get behind common sense gun laws instead of placating fringe gun nuts.

UPDATE: It's not just Mexico.

Whoops

Obama flubs the marijuana legalization issue, Press Secretary Robert Gibss is left to clean up the mess. Of course, this is what happens when you try to defend the indefensible.

Afternoon Reading

Things to note in the world today:

1. Iraq: Sunni militia members in Baghdad revolted Saturday, prompted by the arrest of an Awakenings movement leader by Iraqi forces. The crisis was resolved, but it raises fears that the relationship between the government and Sunni militias-many of which are not being paid as promised-could be strained to the breaking point.

2. A profile of anti-tax nuts, many of whom never met a crazy legal argument they didn't like.

3. The Federal government says GM and Chrysler are not viable, and refuse to offer more aid. Bankruptcy looms for both companies.

4. Mexico faces extreme difficulty putting down the drug cartels, and critics are beginning to call for a change in approach.

5. The women's professional soccer league, version 2.0.

Morning Links

For your reading pleasure:

1. The Treasury Dept. is set to announce new regulatory controls over previously unregulated financial transactions.

2. The Pentagon says in a new report that China is seeking to boost it's military's power and effectiveness. China says we need to chill out. In the meantime, China prepares to force Tibetans to celebrate "Serf Liberation Day", the 60th anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

3. 16 die in a Baghdad bombing.

4. American cities are dealing with an increase in "shantytowns" as the number of homeless rise. Hollywood producers Peter Samuelson wants to give them something better than cardboard boxes to live in.

5. Secretary Clinton bluntly admits that the failed U.S. war on drugs has contributed to rising violence in Mexico.

6. American taxpayers are paying for the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, if in a backhanded way.

7. New study says that most wrongful convictions in Texas stem from witness misidentification.

8. Lisa Falkenberg on Gov. Perry's stimulus fund logic (or lack thereof.)

9. The next American soccer star?

10. A question about student loan forgiveness tops the list at the new "ask the President" website.

More Recommended Reading

End of the day links for your edification:

1. John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, in which Atwood takes something of a meta-view of debt. In essence our profligate ways with our own money reflect our attitudes towards the capital that is our planet, but that the Earth will not be so kind as the present crisis when it's time to pay it back.

2. U.S. officials accuse Pakistan's ISI of supporting Taliban attacks in Afghanistan in a very direct manner, with ISI agents going so far as to strategize with the Taliban about attacks on American forces. Meanwhile, former members of the Taliban say that talks with the Taliban are a possible route to peace, though one says of American forces: "They have a right to ensure that there is no danger to them from Afghanistan...[but] That is the limit of their rights in this country."

3. An aging Dalai Lama concedes that his strategy of engaging the Chinese leadership on Tibet has failed not only to gain traction for Tibetan autonomy, but to slow down the Chinese makeover of the country. China's response to any burgeoning demonstrations of Tibetan independence is met only with repression and violence, but alternative strategies are wanting.

4. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister-delegate, insists that Israel is a "partner for peace" while at the same time he's making backdoor deals to expand Israeli settlements in a particular part of the West Bank, a move that the U.S. government has long opposed as an impediment to peace.

5. In an op-ed for the WSJ, three former Presidents of Latin American countries argue that the "war on drugs" is a dismal failure, and it's time for a new course of action.

The Beam in our Own Eye

This article gets to the heart of the hypocrisy that defines our relationship with Mexico; hysteria over the possibility that any American might be killed as a result of the drug war, and an unwillingness to take any responsibility for our part in Mexico's troubles:

Mexico’s economy is being dragged down by the recession to the north. American addicts have turned Mexico into a drug superhighway, and its police and soldiers are under assault from American guns. Nafta promised 15 years ago that Mexican trucks would be allowed on American roads, but Congress said they were unsafe.

[...]

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives in Mexico on Wednesday for what will be the first in a parade of visits by top administration officials, including President Obama himself next month, to try to head off a major foreign policy crisis close to home. They will find a country mired in a deepening slump, miffed by signs of protectionism in its largest trading partner, and torn apart by a drug war for which many in Mexico blame customers in the United States.

There is plenty of angst on the other side as well. Many American communities are worried about drug violence spilling over the border, and about Mexican immigrants taking scarce jobs. That is forcing the Obama administration, already managing two wars and a deep recession, to fashion a new Mexico policy earlier than it might have wished.

[...]

Some in the administration have suggested that the Mexican government is not in control of all of its territory, even as other officials praise President Felipe Calderón’s resolve to fight the drug trade. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urged and then backed away from reinstituting a ban on sales of assault rifles, which are fueling the drug violence.

Mr. Obama acknowledged contingency plans to deploy troops to the border if too much of the violence spilled over into the United States, but he said almost in the same breath that no such deployment was imminent.

“I think it’s unacceptable if you’ve got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens,” Mr. Obama told reporters when asked if he might deploy troops. “I think if one U.S. citizen is killed because of foreign nationals who are engaging in violent crime, that’s enough of a concern to do something about it.”

The bloody drug war, which has caused 7,000 deaths in 16 months, has become the principal sore point between the countries. Although addiction rates among Mexicans are on the rise, the vast majority of the drugs flowing through Mexico will be sniffed, smoked or injected by Americans. On top of that, 90 percent of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels originated in the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

So Obama is forced to answer questions about deploying troops to the border with Mexico (troops that Texas law enforcement officials don't even want) even as Mexican deaths in drug related violence outnumber American deaths by about 7,000 to 200, as Americans continue to buy drugs from Mexican cartels, and as gun sellers sell weapons to those same cartels at a tidy profit. Can anyone explain why it isn't Mexico that's considering sending troops to the border with us?

UPDATE: The response to rising violence in Mexico will be, of course, another offensive in the endless war on drugs.

Ridiculous

Anti-drug hysteria should not permit school officials to order children to strip down to their underwear and humiliated so they can be searched for drugs, especially when the terror that school officials are afraid of consists of something like prescription strength Ibuprofen. We are not permitted to treat children as we wish and justify it with concerns for their safety, and law professors aside, there should exist not "reasonable" disagreement about that fact.

U.S. Arms Dealers Arm Mexican Drug Cartels

There is a thriving trade between Mexico and the United States: they send us drugs, we send them guns. And if you've been reading us for awhile you realize that yes, we've written about this before. From today's article:

Smugglers routinely enlist Americans with clean criminal records to buy two or three rifles at a time, often from different shops, then transport them across the border in cars and trucks, often secreting them in door panels or under the hood, law enforcement officials here say. Some of the smuggled weapons are also bought from private individuals at gun shows, and the law requires no notification of the authorities in those cases.

“We can move against the most outrageous purveyors of arms to Mexico, but the characteristic of the arms trade is it’s a ‘parade of ants’ — it’s not any one big dealer, it’s lots of individuals,” said Arizona’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, who is prosecuting Mr. Iknadosian. “That makes it very hard to detect because it’s often below the radar.”

[...]

The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes. But A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico come from dealers north of the border.

In 2007, the firearms agency traced 2,400 weapons seized in Mexico back to dealers in the United States, and 1,800 of those came from dealers operating in the four states along the border, with Texas first, followed by California, Arizona and New Mexico.

I'm for the legal buying and selling of guns. I accept that as a society we've made a decision about the type of weapons we permit gun owners to have, and the consequences that may follow as a result. I just wonder if most people realize that one of those consequences is serving as the equivalent of a Mogadishu arms bazaar to Mexican drug cartels.

Futility

We're fighting the war on drugs, but the only people getting killed are south of the border. 

The Neverending War

On the failures of the drug war:

On June 17, America's longest-running war reached another milestone -- 37 years and counting, with no end in sight. Hardly anyone noticed. Neither of the leading presidential candidates mentioned the struggle that has cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and countless American lives. A Senate hearing was held to mark the anniversary, but hardly anyone came.

A few weeks later, there was a major breakthrough in the war when three hostages -- the longest-held U.S. captives in the world at more than five years -- were freed in a dramatic military rescue. But few Americans had ever even heard of Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell or Thomas Howes or knew that when they were captured by guerrillas in Colombia, they had been fighting on the front lines of the U.S. war on drugs.

Declared by then-president Richard M. Nixon in 1971, the drug war no longer has the glitter it once had. Two decades ago, illicit imports of cocaine, heroin and marijuana and their use by Americans topped the list of public concerns in nationwide surveys at 22 percent. In January, a Pew Research Center poll found that only 1 percent of the population considered drugs and alcohol the most important problem facing the country.

...as the Colombia hostage story illustrates, the fight against illicit drugs goes on, and it is not without peril.

Nor is it without domestic consequences, as experts testified at last summer's poorly-attended hearing, chaired by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). About "500,000 persons are locked up for drug offenses in any one day" in this country, said Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland's criminology department. John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America noted that the annual economic costs of illicit drugs have grown significantly over the past 15 years; in a 2004 study, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) put the figure at $181 billion.

When he began the war on drugs, Nixon called it an "emergency response to a national problem which we intend to control" within five years. Demand, he said, was the engine that drove the industry and "when drug traffic in narcotics is no longer profitable, the traffic will cease." By the mid-1980s, the explosive mixture of crack cocaine and crime had led to tough mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug offenders and Ronald Reagan had labeled it a national security problem. With narcotics providing massive amounts of income to the Taliban in Afghanistan, FARC guerrillas in Colombia and other extremist groups around the world, President Bush has defined the drug trade as a major part of the terrorist threat.

But the war has arguably had little discernible effect on either supply or demand. At latest count, as Webb noted last summer, illegal drug flows are four times more valuable than global exports of beer and wine -- even though the street price of both cocaine and heroin are 80 percent lower than in the 1980s. Illicit drug use has remained relatively constant, involving about 8 percent of the U.S. population, since the beginning of this decade.

The analogy of a war isn't apt, as there really is no victory possible against this sort of illegal activity; the drug "war" is more like a disease that can't be cured but can perhaps be regulated. But what's truly discouraging is that for the billions spent, the millions imprisoned and an untold number killed, we really are no nearer to any measure of success than we were in 1971. We've experienced various phases in the war as various drugs have gained or lost popularity, but have yet to make any major inroads against the ever shifting panorama of drug lords and cartels that each pop up in the wake of the destruction of another. Worse yet, are the unanticipated consequences of our war on drugs:

The presidential nominees -- Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama -- have said little about the drug war. But there are signs on the horizon that it may regain its place as a first-tier issue. The warnings come from Mexico, where President Felipe Calderón's government is engaged in a fierce battle against violent, homegrown drug cartels that has already cost thousands of lives. It does not take a geography major to understand the implications for the United States if this war gets out of hand.

Indeed it does not, and the Houston Chronicle explains in more detail exactly how the drug war in northern Mexico is spilling over into Texas:

Frustrated by a crackdown on South Texas drug smuggling routes, the Mexican Gulf Cartel is stockpiling high-powered weapons and recruiting local gang members on both sides of the border to prepare for possible confrontations with U.S. law enforcement, according to an FBI intelligence report.

The regional leader of the cartel's enforcer group, the Zetas, Jaime "El Hummer" Gonzalez Duran ordered dozens of reinforcements to Reynosa, Mexico, across the river from McAllen, the report said.

"These replacements are believed to be armed with assault rifles, bulletproof vests and grenades and are occupying safe houses throughout the McAllen area," the report obtained by The McAllen Monitor said.

The Monitor reported in today's editions that the local FBI office refused to comment on the report.

Erik Vasys, an FBI spokesman in San Antonio, refused to discuss the details of the report but told The Associated Press "we acknowledge the Zetas are a significant problem in Mexico and they have the potential to pose a significant problem to law enforcement on this side of the border."

There isn't an institutional impetus for vast drug cartels in the United States, but it's all too easy for them to extend their tendrils of influence across the border of Mexico. The cartels, never known for their discretion (hundreds of civilians have died this year in Mexico at the hands of the cartels) are nothing if not prickly when it comes to defending their drug trade, and such moves come despite a recent effort by Mexico's President to use federal troops to crack down on the cartels. Now, almost forty years into the drug war, did anyone imagine that the cartels would be stockpiling weapons in our country in preparation for battles with our law enforcement agencies? If this is a war, we're in retreat.

Afghanistan opium farmers are being forced to sell their daughters

Newsweek has a heartbreaking article on opium farmers in Afghanistan being forced to sell their young daughters to pay loans to local drug traffickers after their crops are destroyed by American/Karzai eradication programs. Of course, these poppies are pretty much the only reliable cash crop these people have, and as we've detailed before, removing their sole source of income leads to neither a victory in the war on terror or the war on drugs. This story only serves to question more the wisdom of our policy.

Holbrooke: Opium Policy "Still Wrong"

In August the Bush administration announced a renewed effort to reduce opium cultivation in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, former ambassador and diplomat-extrordinaire Richard Holbrooke took the pages of the Washington Post to condemn this failing strategy:

"I'm a spray man myself," President Bush told government leaders and American counter-narcotics officials during his 2006 trip to Afghanistan. He said it again when President Hamid Karzai visited Camp David in August. Bush meant, of course, that he favors aerial eradication of poppy fields in Afghanistan, which supplies over 90 percent of the world's heroin. His remarks -- which, despite their flippant nature, were definitely not meant as a joke -- are part of the story behind the spectacularly unsuccessful U.S. counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan. Karzai and much of the international community in Kabul have warned Bush that aerial spraying would create a backlash against the government and the Americans, and serve as a recruitment device for the Taliban while doing nothing to reduce the drug trade. This is no side issue: If the program continues to fail, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the area under opium cultivation increased to 193,000 hectares in 2007 from 165,000 in 2006. The harvest also grew, to 8,200 tons from 6,100. Could any program be more unsuccessful?

The program destroys crops in insecure areas, especially in the south, where the Taliban is strongest. This policy pushes farmers with no other source of livelihood into the arms of the Taliban without reducing the total amount of opium being produced.

Everyone talks about "alternative livelihoods" and alternative crops as the solution to the drug problem. This is true in theory -- but this theory has been tried elsewhere with almost no success. Poppies are an easy crop to grow and are far more valuable than any other product that can be grown in the rocky, remote soil of most of Afghanistan. Without roads, it is hard to get heavier (and less valuable) crops to market -- and what market is there, anyway? It will take years to create the networks of roads, markets and lucrative crops that would induce farmers to switch, especially when government officials, including some with close ties to the presidency, are protecting the drug trade and profiting from it.

In other words, opium production is actually flourishing in the regions where the Taliban is weakest, not where they are strongest. But eradication is aimed at the politically weakest population, those Afghans living in areas dominated by the Taliban. So, the program punishes Afghan farmers who are trying to provide for their families, fails to undermine the Taliban's profits from the drug trade, and does nothing at all about the government officials and warlords profiting from the drug trade in more secure regions. For some Bush administration officials the answer to this problem is spraying herbicides on the crops, and necessarily the heads of Afghan farmers and their families, a policy that inspired a backlash against us in Columbia while sickening the poorest of Colombians and destroying their livelihood.

The only reason we are even that concerned about the opium trade is because of our government's never-ending focus on the "drug war", a policy that has worked to the detriment of civil rights at home, destroyed the social fabric in poorer urban centers, and distorted our foreign policy. The blame for this rests with Democratic and Republican administrations, who find drugs to be an easy target through which to score political points.

The only solution to the opium problem in Afghanistan is to win the war against the Taliban. That should be nearly our sole focus, and we should not be distracted by efforts to carry our drug war across the world to where our soldiers are busy trying to win an actual war. Once that's done, we'll see about cleaning up the opium "problem."

2,000 Guns

That's how many weapons are being illegally smuggled into Mexico for use by the drug cartels. Where are they coming from? Why, the U.S. of course:

The high-powered guns used in both incidents on the evening of Sept. 24 undoubtedly came from the United States, say police here, who estimate that 100 percent of drug-related killings are committed with smuggled U.S. weapons.

The guns pass into Mexico through the "ant trail," the nickname for the steady stream of people who each slip two or three weapons across the border every day. The "ants" -- along with larger smuggling operations -- are feeding a rapidly expanding arms race between Mexican drug cartels.

The U.S. weapons -- as many as 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study -- are crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode.

Corrupt customs officials help smuggle weapons into Mexico, earning as much as $1 million for large shipments, police here say. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.

...law enforcement officers on both sides of the border have never seen anything like the flood of guns now surging into Mexico. The increase has been stoked by the cartel war and by the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, William Newell, a special agent in charge of the ATF's Phoenix office, said in an interview.

Arizona and Texas have become a "gunrunner's paradise," according to Garen Wintemute, a professor at the University of California at Davis who published a study on gun buying in the Southwest. Licensed dealers must conduct background checks, but unlicensed sellers can sell "personal collections" at weekend gun shows without background checks.

Laws on personal collections were established to allow people such as the widows of avid gun collectors to make sales without having to go through an elaborate licensing procedure. But unscrupulous sellers and buyers have taken advantage of the system, Newell said, setting up phony personal collections booths and making quick sales that are difficult to trace.

"It can take less than a minute," said Wintemute, who has watched unlicensed dealers wearing sandwich boards at gun shows and piling weapons for sale into baby carriages.

If you don't have a problem with the U.S. being the number 1 source for guns in a drug war killing hundreds a month, then there's something wrong with you. Whatever your beliefs about the Second Amendment may be, I'm pretty sure the Framers didn't have in mind that it would be used as a justification for gun dealers to enrich themselves by supplying weapons to all sides in what is practically a civil war. But we can't energize Congress to change gun laws after American students are mowed down in classrooms, so I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath for them to express a small amount of concern over the number of Mexicans being killed by our guns.

Advocate for Medicinal Marijuna Commits Suicide

Via John Cole, another casualty in the War on Drugs.

Afghanistan Drug Policy

In case you didn't realize, Afghanistan is the central front in the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Afghanistan is now a major producer of opium and the Bush administration, with the help of the Karzai government, has been trying for four years to reduce opium production in the country. They have largely failed:

[U.S. Ambassador] Schweich acknowledged that US programs had only achieved mixed results in curbing the narcotics trade in Afghanistan. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, total annual poppy production in Afghanistan increased by 49 percent in 2006, from 4,500 to 6,700 metric tons of opium. US government experts estimate that opium production currently amounts to almost a third of Afghanistan’s total Gross Domestic Product, or slightly over $3 billion.

This after we've stepped up efforts to stop poppy production. For these reasons, the Bush administration has announced a change in the program:

The administration still considers the main elements of its five-point Afghan counternarcotics strategy fundamentally correct for advancing toward that deadline. These elements include (1) waging an effective public information campaign; (2) providing opium farmers with alternative and legal opportunities for earning their livelihood; (3) enhancing the capacity of Afghan law enforcement agencies to prosecute major narco-traffickers through their imprisonment or extradition; (4) eradicating opium crops; and (5) interdicting the flow of narcotics within and beyond Afghanistan.

Since no alternative crop can match the income earned from opium production, it was essential to increase the potential costs of participating in narcotics trafficking by increasing the financial and legal costs for potential traffickers. To help achieve this goal, the United States will enhance its training and equipping programs and fund an increase in the size of Afghanistan’s counternarcotics police force so that the authorities can step up the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of leading drug traffickers.

In Schweich’s assessment, some coercion is essential because many Afghan opium cultivators will only abandon their illegal activities when faced with more effective Afghan law enforcement institutions. He also maintained that a tough policy would assist the counterinsurgency campaign by countering Taliban efforts to portray the government of President Hamid Karzai as weak.

In other words, they're aiming to crack down even more on the farmers who grow the poppy. The problem of course is that although the people who engage in the drug trade are notorious warlords and drug traffickers, the people who actually grow the drug are ordinary Afghan farmers. This policy, at least as far as I read it, intends to punish them even more harshly for growing the drug, which is the most profitable crop in Afghanistan and a rational choice for any farmer struggling to feed a family in a poor and war-torn country. What this policy does not do is provide those farmers an effective alternative to growing opium. Without such an incentive, farmers are highly unlikely to give up opium no matter how tough the Karzai government is. As for propaganda uses, well yes an effective drug enforcement program would certainly counter the image of Karzai as weak. Unfortunately, it will also allow the Taliban to portray Karzai as even more of a tool of the coalition (after all, there's no mistaking who wants these drugs destroyed) and both Karzai and us as completely uninterested in the welfare of the Afghan farmer. So, propaganda victory? No. Victory in the War on Drugs? Well...no.

The Booming Cigarette Business

The NY Times, on how capitalism isn't good for the lungs:

For all the industry’s apparent troubles, however, the future of cigarettes appears to be brighter than ever.

That at least is the message investors are sending as the Altria Group — the company once known as Philip Morris and the maker of the world’s most popular cigarette, Marlboro — prepares to split itself by spinning off its Kraft Foods division to shareholders and become, once again, primarily a tobacco company. Today, Louis C. Camilleri, the chief executive of Altria, is expected to set a timetable for completing the spinoff.

It is a move that Wall Street is responding to with the equivalent of a standing ovation, but it is not because Kraft Foods, the world’s second-largest food company, after Nestlé, will finally shed the taint of tobacco.

Investors are glad that Altria will finally be rid of Kraft Foods, the maker of Oreo cookies, Velveeta and Tang. Since October, when the company announced its plan for the move, its shares have risen 10 percent.

Why is Wall Street so infatuated with cigarettes? Cigarettes have certain advantages over other consumer products, not the least of which is that they are addictive. They are inexpensive to make, require almost no innovation, there is a global market for them, and cigarette makers can raise prices without seeing much of a drop in business.

On top of all that, a recent string of court decisions has convinced investors that the worst of the litigation against tobacco companies is over.

"Certain advantages" indeed. Despite decades of litigation, and one horror story after another of the tobacco companies' collective efforts to hide the addictive properties of nicotine and the dangers of cigarette smoking, business is still booming. The only answer to this is regulation. Now.

Life in Prison for Smoking Pot

It is long past time to let this man go (via Hit & Run.) His punishment is unexplainable, and remains unexplained by the sentencing judge who refuses to be interviewed about the case but is himself seeking to have the sentence overturned. Tyrone Brown should be a free man, and you can tell Governor Perry so here.