This is the ultimate result of the illegal marijuana market the Prop 19 traitors support

(Huffington Post) MEXICO CITY — Gunmen killed 15 people at a car wash Wednesday in a Mexican Pacific coast state where drug-gang violence has risen this year. It was the third massacre in Mexico in less than a week.

President Felipe Calderon, speaking at a forum on security, called for a minute of silence for the victims of the Tepic attack and two other massacres that have occurred since Friday: an attack on a birthday party that killed 14 young people in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and a shooting at a drug rehab center in Tijuana that killed 13 recovering addicts.

The three attacks did not appear to be related. Such mass shootings have become increasingly common in Mexico, where drug-gang violence surged after Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels soon after taking office in December 2006.

In April, 12 bodies, eight of them partially burned, were found in the fields outside the Nayarit town of Xalisco. Gonzalez, the governor, ordered schools to close early in June because of rising violence.

In other bloodshed in Ciudad Juarez, gunmen killed three undercover Mexican federal police officers as they waited for a person to cross a bridge from El Paso, Texas, authorities said Wednesday.

In an unrelated attack, a Chihuahua state police officer was killed Wednesday in his Ciudad Juarez home, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.

In the northwest city of Culiacan, meanwhile, gunmen burst into a Red Cross hospital and kidnapped a young man who had been shot, said Martin Gastelum, a spokesman for the Sinaloa state attorney general’s office.

One of the main reasons the public supported the repeal of the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol is because they saw blood and bodies in American streets, bullet-riddled by the Tommy guns of gangsters like Al Capone.  The Depression and economic pressure are what convinced our leaders to abandon Prohibition, but it was moms worried about their kids caught in a bootlegger turf war crossfire that provided the popular support the politicians needed to move forward.

Unfortunately, like so many of our good paying jobs, we’ve shipped our drug gang violence to Mexico, where the bodies and bullets are out of sight, out of mind to any American not living in San Ysidro, Brownesville, and El Paso.  You can bet if it were Tulsa, not Tepic, if it were Worcester, not Juarez, if it were Torrance, not Tijuana, Americans would be screaming for an end to it and realize, even more than they do now, that prohibition of drugs is a cure worse than any drug addiction disease.  If it were suburban white teenagers in body bags, not nameless Mexican kids, we’d put an immediate stop to it.

Nothing is going to make this problem go away in one wave of a magic wand.  Prohibition of marijuana has to be dismantled in small steps and replaced with a legal regulated market, just as New York and California first refused to enforce alcohol prohibition and forced the feds to eventually relent and allow for creation of the legal alcohol market.  A YES vote on Prop 19 in five days is that first small step.  A NO vote on Prop 19 says you accept slaughtered Mexican teenagers as an unavoidable cost of Americans getting high.

(El Paso Times) EL PASO — Mexican federal police said Saturday that they arrested a second man in connection with the recent birthday party massacre in Juárez in which gunmen killed 16 people, including 11 teenagers.

Federal officials said the team of shooters were tipped off that people at the birthday party were members of a rival gang known as Artistas Asesinos (Artists Assassins), who reportedly work for the Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán drug cartel from Sinaloa.

The shooters were informed that the party would be at 10:30 p.m. Around that time, 16 gunmen arrived, some armed with AK-47s and AR-15 assault rifles, to shoot the partygoers, and sealed off the 1300 block of Villas del Portal.

Officials said some of the victims were gang members, but most were identified as students and athletes.

The attackers initially did not mean to kill some women and children. Arzate Meléndez said at a news conference Saturday that Ramírez said “que dispararan a todos parejo,” which roughly translates to “shoot everyone.”

In total, 16 died and 12 were wounded. The youngest killed was a 13-year-old girl; the oldest was 42.

Stop and think about this.  This massacre occurred just over the border from El Paso, Texas.  Imagine chaperoning your teenage son’s or daughter’s birthday party.  Picture gunmen with assault rifles bursting in, spraying your home with gunfire.  Try to comprehend the horror of trying to escape, trying to help your child, and finding every escape route blocked by more gunmen.

28% of young people will use marijuana this year; 11% will use twice a week or more.

You may think that Juárez is far away and that you and your children have nothing to do with rival drug gang warfare, so this doesn’t affect you.  But so long as there exists a War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs, there is the chance you can get caught up in the crossfire.  These Mexican gangs are controlling marijuana trafficking in 230 American cities.  28% of all young people aged 18-25 will use marijuana this year; 11% will use more than twice a week.  Those young people are going to get their marijuana from someone.  Will it be a dealer for a Mexican gang from Sinaloa or Juárez?  Could there be a misunderstanding that leads to gunmen attacking your college-aged child’s party in Peoria, Pocatello, or Portland?

Plus you must remember that both sides fighting the War on Marijuana are well armed and that sometimes, police make mistakes, too.  Mistakes on search warrants for drug raids killed 64-year-old John Adams of Lebanon, Tennessee; 46-year-old Willie Heard of Osawatomie, Kansas; 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston of Atlanta, Georgia; 45-year-old Israel Mena of Denver, Colorado; 44-year-old Cheryl Noel of Dunkalk, Maryland; 65-year-old Mario Paz of Compton, California; and 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda of Modesto, California were all shot by police who were serving warrants on locations that either turned out to be wrong addresses or turned out to find no drugs whatsoever.

The only sensible way to protect our children from the horrors of prohibition-related drug trafficking violence is to take the market away from the criminals and give it to responsible law-abiding businesspeople.  After all, when is the last time you hear of teenagers getting caught in the crossfire of Al Capone’s gang warring over moonshine distribution?

BROWNSVILLE (My San Antonio) — The Texas Department of Public Safety last month warned parents of Mexican gang recruitment and the Border Patrol is continuing a “scare and awe” campaign highlighting the risks, including torture and death, of cartel employment that seems to promise street status and easy money.

Laredo police have caught youths as young as 13 in cars full of marijuana still wet from the riverbank, he said, and the geography of the city is obvious enough to know where marijuana in that amount is coming from.

Customs and Border Protection officers in El Paso last March stopped eight juvenile drug smugglers, five of them U.S. citizens, with a total of 388 pounds of marijuana and 4.8 pounds of cocaine, prompting a news release warning that “traffickers will employ any and all types of people in their drug smuggling attempts.”

Since there’s no youth offender program in the federal courts, a 16-year-old caught trying to bring 200 pounds of marijuana over an international bridge will likely wind up in the state’s juvenile system, among thousands of cases heard each year by his county’s state district judges. Most records will be sealed.

Hey, young teen, likely black or Latino, has your mother or father been laid off recently?  Do you need some money to help your family pay the bills in this economic downturn?  If you’re lucky, maybe you can get a job at a fast food joint paying minimum wage.  Maybe you can get some backbreaking field work.  Or maybe you can “move a little product” and make twenty times the money doing one-fifth of the work of either of those jobs.

What do you think the border teen is going to choose?  It’s a win-win for everyone involved; the teenager makes big quick money and keeps the bills paid for the family, the drug gangs get cheap labor to do the job that has the highest arrest risk and lowest correctional expense.

You know who doesn’t hire American teenagers to transport and sell their products?  Beer, wine, and liquor manufacturers.

Clif from our new NORML of Waco called to tell me I just had to see this new article on the cover of the Texas Monthly magazine.  When Texas is calling for legalization, you know we’re winning!

(Texas Monthly) In the early years of the twentieth century, as they poured across the border into Texas, Mexican immigrants brought with them a familiar and cheap intoxicant: cannabis, which they called marihuana (in those days, it was spelled with an h instead of a j). Perhaps because they were young, predominantly male, and away from home—strong correlates of troublesome behavior—they were seen as lacking appropriate inhibition, especially when they came to town on weekends. Cerveza may have been more culpable, but cannabis made an easier target. In 1914, after a melee allegedly involving a marijuana smoker, the El Paso city government passed what is believed to have been the first law banning a drug that had been legally and widely used for at least five thousand years. Other cities and states quickly followed suit. Before long, marijuana was forbidden everywhere, and its use was often harshly punished.

It’s ironic, then, that nearly a century after it fired the first shot in the war on weed, the Sun City has been flirting with a cease-fire. In January, besieged by drug wars in Mexico that killed more than 5,600 people in 2008, almost a third in neighboring Ciudad Juárez alone, the El Paso City Council unanimously approved city representative Beto O’Rourke’s motion that the federal government hold an open and honest debate about legalizing all narcotics in the United States. Mayor John Cook vetoed that recommendation. “We would be the laughingstock of the country for having something like this on the books,” he said.

The incident drew national attention and some criticism, but it sparked the kind of serious conversation O’Rourke was seeking. “No one is laughing about it,” he says. “It’s not funny that sixteen hundred people died in our sister city in the course of one year in the most brutal fashion imaginable. We’ve had waves of violence before, but it took events of this magnitude to convince everyone that something is deeply wrong here, that we are part of the problem and we can do something to fix it. It’s the demand that’s fueling this war. If our drug laws were different, I will absolutely guarantee you that our body count would be different.”

See also the concurrent article, “Weed all about it“, where prominent conservative Texas Republicans are calling for an end to adult marijuana prohibition.  Yes, my friends, the tide is turning.

“They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no…”

(Comcast) CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen broke into a drug rehabilitation center, lined people against a wall and shot 17 dead in a particularly bloody day in Mexico’s relentless drug war. The brazen attack followed the killing of the No. 2 security official in President Felipe Calderon’s home state.

The attackers on Wednesday broke down the door of El Aliviane center in Ciudad Juarez, lined up their victims against a wall and opened fire, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the regional prosecutors’ office. At least five people were injured.

Authorities had no immediate suspects or information on the victims. Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, is Mexico’s most violent city, with at least 1,400 people killed this year alone.

I can’t quite figure out the motivation for gunning down people in rehab.  Usually these cartels are targeting police, federal officials, and rival cartels.  Maybe some of the people in the rehab were formerly involved with the cartels and trying to “go straight”.  It’s a shame – “duck and cover” isn’t usually covered in the Twelve Steps.

Gunmen killed the No. 2 security official and three other people in Calderon’s home state of Michoacan, where the government is locked in an intensifying battle with the ruthless La Familia cartel, blamed for a string of assassinations of police and soldiers.

Jose Manuel Revuelta, who was promoted less than two weeks ago to state deputy public safety director, is the highest-ranking government official killed in the wave of assassinations sweeping Michoacan, the cradle of La Familia drug cartel.

Attackers drove up alongside Revuelta as he headed home and opened fire, state Attorney General Jesus Montejano said.

Revuelta tried to speed away, but only made it a few blocks before he was intercepted by two vehicles. Six gunmen got out and sprayed Revuelta’s car with bullets, killing him, two bodyguards and a truck driver caught in the crossfire, Montejano said.

Sounds like a scene from a Hollywood movie, but this is the reality many Mexicans live with every day.  Just like Chicagoans in the 1920s.

Calderon first launched his crackdown against drug cartels in Michoacan, sending thousands of federal police and soldiers to his home state after taking office in late 2006. Tens of thousands more have since been deployed to drug hotspots across Mexico.

Drug gang violence has since surged, claiming more than 13,500 lives, including more than 1,000 police officers.

Calderon defended his battle against drug trafficking in a speech to Congress on Wednesday. He said the government has taken on the cartels as no previous Mexican administration has dared to do.

“As never before, we have weakened the logistical and financial structure of crime,” the president told legislators.

You might say we’ve “turned a corner” in battling the cartels and that the insurgency is in “its last throes”, huh, Mr. Cheney… er, Calderon?  That’s the problem with putting a medical issue in the hands of warriors – war is their justification, not public health.  Is the violence subsiding or are there fewer people using drugs?  Great, that means the Drug War is working, let’s keep at it.  Is the violence increasing or are there more people using drugs?  That must mean we’re not fighting the Drug War hard enough, let’s redouble our efforts.  Never can it be uttered that perhaps the Drug War itself is the problem, for it is always drugs that are the problem and war is the only solution.

(AP) EL PASO, Texas — The eight bullets that leveled Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana outside his home just doors from the city’s police chief were fired at close range and left little doubt about their message.

Gonzalez, a Juarez cartel lieutenant shot on his quiet El Paso cul-de-sac this spring, was working for U.S. officials as a confidential informant, sources told The Associated Press, and experts suspect his slaying may be the first time assassins from one of Mexico’s violent drug gangs have killed a ranking cartel member on American soil.

Cartel-affiliated hit men have violently, and fatally, disciplined low-level, American-based drug dealers in the U.S. But El Paso police said Gonzalez was a lieutenant in the Juarez cartel, which traffics in marijuana, cocaine and heroin. The cartel was once among the most dangerous in Mexico, but has recently lost some standing because of arrests, deaths and infighting.

El Paso police don’t yet have an official motive in Gonzalez’s slaying, but chief Allen said detectives are working on the assumption that a cartel colleague discovered he was discussing their illegal activities with federal agents.

How many gangland-style executions will have to take place on American streets before we get serious about legalizing these murderers right out of business?  I hear a few people complain about taxing and regulating marijuana as a legal substance because then the big bad ol’ government will have its hands on it, but last I checked the IRS doesn’t send hit men out to quiet residential neighborhoods to deliver a “message” about delinquent tax payments.

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Hemp Headlines

1. Mendocino county adopts “voluntary” $25 / plant zip-tie fee
2. THC shown to help patients with schizophrenia
3. El Paso Times: Juárez cartels beating 10,000 Mexican feds
4. What happens to NORML when we finally re-legalize marijuana?

Cultivator’s Corner with High Times’ Sr. Cultivation Editor Danny Danko

• What’s the difference between growing from seeds vs. clones?
• How can I keep my grow room cool in the summer? Will cold air from an air conditioner hurt plants?
• Can I use a acidic-pH water to kill spider mite on my plants? What are the best techniques to kill the little buggers?

Daily Toker Tunes by Marijuana Music Awards

• Burning Bush – Honest Day’s Work (the theme music from our Government at Work segment, since I’m posting before Tam is awake Down Under.)

Cannabis Conversations

• Part II with Ryan Grim from Huffington Post on “This is Your Country on Drugs”

Trade with Mexico, via Juárez, is vital to El Paso’s economy. And we are close-knit with family and friends in Juárez; so many of us fear a loved one will be caught in the crossfire of bullets. Some have — and died.

Soldiers haven’t stopped gangland-style murders, now about seven daily right next door.

And not just some soldiers — it’s 7,500 soldiers plus 2,300 federal police officers. That’s 9,800 law enforcers who haven’t ebbed the rampant killings. There have been 130 just this month, and 2,300 in the past 18 months.

Drug-trafficking expert Victor Clark told the Associated Press that the thousands of soldiers and federal police do little intelligence work.

Not only that, but Clark notes:

“I see two wars, the visible and the invisible one. The visible one is the dead that the media reports on every day, but the dead are just cheap labor. The invisible one is … the business class and the politicians who really benefit from the millions that the drug trade generates …”

It has long been suspected that profits from illegal drug trading stream into many walks of Mexican life — and into politics and business. Some take the money. Some look the other way.

It’s a shame to say that drugs are a major part of Mexico’s economy, and that could be why soldiers and police can’t beat the drug cartels.

In our case, nearly 10,000 can’t stop gangsters in our sister city, Juárez.

No amount of soldiers, police, weapons, or money can change the inviolable laws of supply and demand.  The harder you try to pinch the suppliers, the more risk and scarcity you add to the supply, the higher the price and the steeper the profits.  Those profits translate into six-figure monthly bribes for police and government officials who live on three-figure monthly salaries.

The demand in America for marijuana and drugs is great.  In the case of drugs like heroin and cocaine, the sources, opium and coca, do not grow well here, so there will always be some level of drug trafficking that will get heroin from Afghanistan and cocaine from Columbia into the United States.  In the case of drugs like ecstacy and meth, the precursor ingredients and manufacturing are tightly controlled in the US, so there will always be some trafficking from places like China, India, and Germany with lesser controls.

But in the case of marijuana, responsible for 60%-75% of the profits of these murderous cartels, there is a foolproof way of nearly eliminating American demand for Mexican trafficked marijuana – let Americans grow the supply domestically!  As our nation’s economy tumbles and unemployment nudges toward 10% (already over 12% here in Oregon and over in Michigan – 1 in 8 can’t find work!), we will not have the luxury of spending money fighting marijuana, ignoring the tax revenues we could reap from its legal sales, and forbidding new hemp farming, hemp processing, and cannabis production and retailing jobs that would be generated by a legal marijuana industry.

I just hope it doesn’t take months or years of seven murders per day in Mexico, or those murders coming to American city streets, to get our politicians to see the ultimate folly of marijuana prohibition and wisdom in legalization.

JUAREZ — The newly-formed vigilante group “El Comando Ciudadano Por Juarez” proclaimed its manifesto Tuesday in a news release to Juarez media. It vowed to take over the streets in a matter of months if city, state and federal leaders fail to restore order.

In the manifesto, the group identified Commandante Abraham as its leader and Subcommandante Gabriel “Durito (Hard One)” as second-in-command.

Chihuahua’s Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez-Rodriguez denied the existence of the vigilante group Monday, stating the group was merely a fabrication by drug cartels to instill fear into Juarenses and generate more violence to de-stabilize the city.

In 2008, more than 1,600 people were killed in Juarez. City officials attributed the majority of the violent deaths to an ongoing war between rival drug cartels fighting for drug routes into the U.S.

Making matters worse, the city plunged into an economic abyss which gave rise to a rash of violent crime. Kidnappings for ransom and extortions became the norm and some of the city’s wealthiest families fled to El Paso.

The vigilante group stated its mission was to kill one criminal a day and declared war on burglars, kidnappers, and extortionists that constantly violate the rights of citizens. The group told city leaders they have until July 5, 2009 to re-establish order.

A failure to meet that goal by the deadline will result in the group taking the streets with its “army of men and women” who will battle criminals with whatever tool is available.

The manifesto describes the group as an organization consisting of university students, professors, commercial businessmen, unemployed workers and field workers who are willing to give their lives for their city. The group even revealed it is funded by businessmen who have fled their city due to the escalating violence and is willing to work side-by-side with the Mexican Army.

via KVIA.com El Paso, Las Cruces – Weather, News, Sports – Juarez Vigilante group proclaims manifesto, issues warning.

People here have a hard time understanding that there were more kidnappings, terrorism, and beheadings in Mexico last year than Iraq.  This is a serious shooting war going on and 70% of it is funded by the marijuana we are not allowed to grow domestically.  With more than 1,600 deaths in a city of 1.4 million, Juarez beat the 2008 murder totals of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC combined, cities that equal 15.5 million people, or more than ten times larger than Juarez.

Now the people are so terrified they are turning to vigilantism, a sure sign of the beginnings of a failed state.  The politicians are continuing more of the same in-the-box thinking that got them in this situation – more military force through US funding of the Meridia initiative.  Nobody in power can accept the fact that marijuana is here to stay, some people will always want to smoke it, there will always be a marijuana market, and it will be controlled by either the murderous criminals or by We The People.

EL PASO – Mexican cartels have taken over most of the drug trade in the United States, and are working with 20 gangs, including the Barrio Aztecas, according to a just-released report by the National Drug Intelligence Center titled “National Drug Threat Assessment 2009.”

It also said the cartels control drug distribution in most U.S. cities (230 cities have reported a presence of the Mexican drug groups), and “are gaining strength in markets that they do not yet control.”

Mexican, Asian, Colombian, Dominican and Colombian drug organizations work with at least 28 gangs in the United States, which insulate the drug cartel cells from law enforcement and act as retail distributors and enforcers. The gangs listed include the Barrio Azteca, Latin Kings, Maras (MS-13), Hells Angels, Mexican Mafia, Bloods, Crips and others.

via Mexican cartels run U.S. drug trade, report says – El Paso Times.

Upon learning that violent foreign criminal cartels are taking over the US drug trade and extending their control through recruitment of violent local gangs to handle the retail operations, the prohibitionists’ answer is to fight them harder.  Never does it occur to the prohibitionist that WE could take over most of the drug trade in the United States and cut 70% off the Mexican drug cartel’s bottom line!

People will always want to smoke marijuana – we have cannabinoid receptors in our freakin’ brains.  The money people spend on it could buy schoolbooks for kids, but our prohibition on marijuana guarantees it buys bullets for gangsters.  (Maybe if we bought more kids history textbooks, they’d grow up having learned the lessons of prohibition from 1920-1933.)