While President Obama is ignoring our calls to end adult marijuana prohibition and Google/YouTube is deeming our pleas “inappropriate” and unworthy of serious discussion like tennis, parties, and the president’s dancing ability, police in Mexico are forced to put themselves in protective custody because of the threat of assassination at the hands of the drug cartels.  For reasons that escape me, our president and congress seem to prefer that the lucrative marijuana trade is controlled by and benefits these murderous criminals.

(Los Angeles Daily News) CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Every one of the 2,500 police officers in this Mexican border city has been ordered to leave home and stay in a hotel after the killing of five officers by a local drug cartel.

The gang threatened a week ago to kill one policeman a day unless Police Chief Julian Leyzaola resigns.

Police spokesman Adrian Sanchez said officers were ordered to stay away from their houses after Monday’s shootout between assailants and policemen. That assault and previous attacks happened as officers were going to or from home.

The city’s government said it has secured 26 million pesos ($2 million) to house officers in hotels but did not specify how long that would last.

At least 10 banners bearing threats to Juarez’s police chief appeared around the city last week. The messages were signed by the New Juarez Cartel, an offshoot of the La Linea or Juarez Cartel, a major target of law enforcement actions in recent months.

Marijuana that is grown out doors, just like any other agricultural crop, is dependant on Mother Nature to cooperate with the effort. This year, a drought in Northern Mexico has gotten bad enough that it is now affecting the crops, including those that are illicit.

Military officials, who wage much of the war against drug cartels and their products, say that the surveillance flights this year have shown large dry patches in land that is usually lush with illegal marijuana and poppy fields. Rain has been almost non-existent in the region, in a place where many marijuana crops depend on the rain for water. He said that they have moved some operations to focus near streams, where they are finding marijuana farmers trying to eke out smaller crops by diverting water with pumps and hoses.

General Ricardo Trevilla said that the drop in illegal marijuana crops may lead to what he is reporting to sharp rise in the production of synthetic drugs. Trevilla says that the powerful cartels are increasingly turning to drug production for substances like methamphetamine because it has become more profitable, can be made much faster than a marijuana or poppy crop and needs less storage and is harder to detect in transport. Mexican authorities have been seizing record amounts of the chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine, and busting a record number of meth labs in Mexico City and Northern Mexico. In December alone, officials seized a staggering 675 tons of a key precursor chemical, enough to produce incredible amounts of meth.

External Links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/mexico-drought-marijuana_n_1242620.html?ref=green&ir=Green

These are making a whole lot more sense to me now...

A story about a large cannabis bust caught my eye today. This one comes from Brownsville, Texas, and was executed by the Customs and Border Protection agency. In what must have taken untold hours to conceal, agents found more than 3,500 pounds of marijuana concealed in cabbage. No, the marijuana wasn’t hidden in a truck full of cabbage…the marijuana was actually wrapped into ball shapes, and then wrapped up on the outside with actual cabbage leafs to make it look like they were innocent cabbage heads coming from Mexico and headed to a salad bar near you. The cabbage-looking marijuana globes were being transported in a refrigerated truck to help keep up that charade. All in all, there were 1,378 cannabis balls, weighing in at 3,663 pounds of marijuana.

And, in another enterprising bust today, down in Texas, a state trooper pulled over an AT&T service truck for speeding 72 mph in a 60 mph zone. The troopers were suspicious when the driver suddenly bailed and started running on foot. He was caught after a short chase. Authorities found 190 bundles of marijuana inside the AT&T truck weighing in at 2168 pounds. Although the truck looked like an authentic AT&T service vehicle, it was a clone, just a paint job to conceal its contents. Authorities say this isn’t the first time they have come across a cloned work truck. They have also made busts on a fake Halliburton vehicle and a fake FedEx van.

External Links:

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Officers-intercept-marijuana-loads-shaped-like-2612482.php#photo-2098781

When one of your cities has more Drug War murders than California, it refocuses your attention on ending the Drug War

In case you weren’t aware of it, since it’s not Kim Kardashian getting divorced, Dr. Conrad Murray getting convicted, or Gov. Rick Perry getting confused, in Mexico bloggers are being tortured and beheaded.  It’s the latest shock in what is a bona-fide 40,000+ casualties shooting war with terrorists literally across a bridge from Laredo, Texas.

(TIME) Another blogger was found murdered in the Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo on Wednesday, according to the Houston Chronicle. This is the fourth blogger since September that has been reportedly killed by the Zetas, a powerful drug cartel that has been instrumental in keeping the country’s devastating drug war alive.

The man helped moderate a site called En Vivo, which posted information about the Zetas’ activities. The blogger, who posted under the name “Rascatripas,” was found beheaded at an intersection next to a note which read “This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report on the social networks.”

Last week, hacker collective Anonymous apparently abandoned their plans (if such plans ever really existed) to take on the Zetas cartel, perhaps after a report from Stratfor claimed “Los Zetas are deploying their own teams of computer experts to track those individuals involved in the online anti-cartel campaign, which indicates that the criminal group is taking the campaign very seriously.”

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/11/10/fourth-blogger-reportedly-killed-by-los-zetas-mexican-drug-cartel/#ixzz1dMZi4aI6

The citizens of Mexico have taken to Facebook, Twitter, and forums just to communicate basic information they need to survive day-to-day, since visible and known television, radio, and newspaper reporters can’t or won’t cover these stories for fear of their own lives.  Information like where the cartels have struck, what has it done to traffic, is it safe today, can I take my kid down the street without him seeing yet another disemboweled woman’s dead tortured body hanging off the overpass?  (NSFW link warning: The UK media actually covers shooting wars on our southern border.  With pictures.)

The problem is Los Zetas, the particular drug gang in this story, doesn’t like even the local news media “snitching” on their activities, much less the entire world reading through the internet.  And unlike everyone else on the internet (except Jay & Silent Bob), they have the resources to go door-to-door and literally kill every local blogger they consider a troll.

(Boston.com) Despite heightened security awareness among the site’s users Thursday, with warnings not to share personal information with anyone, they remain tremendously vulnerable, said Matt Harrigan, chief executive of the San Diego, California-based security firm Critical Assets.

A trail of information like cookies, server addresses, login and account information was easy visible for some users.

“I know enough about (one user) that I’m uncomfortable with how much I know about (him) just from visiting the site,” said Harrigan. “Just from having looked up information about him, the number of things I know about the guy is pretty staggering.”

Harrigan said it would be relatively easy, with the money the Zetas have from running drugs, to track down posters.

“If you’re a Mexican cartel with hundreds of millions of dollars, there certainly are security experts in Mexico or former hackers, or whoever they are, that I’m certain they’re for hire,” he said.

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1. Update on Fort Collins dispensary ban voting
2. Mother files suit against store that sold K2 to her son, which she says contributed to his death
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4. Anonymous, the hacker group, threatens Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel

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• Kottonmouth Kings – “Time To Get High”

These guys literally have gold-plated machine guns. Bought and paid for by American Marijuana Prohibition (and, perhaps, walked into Mexico while the ATF watched).

FOX News Latino is reporting news of a huge drug ring bust with the headline “Arizona Busts Billion Dollar Drug Ring Tied To Mexican Cartels“. Based on the report, over 99% of the drugs seized in what was called “Operation Pipeline Express” was marijuana.

The ring is believed be tied to the Sinaloa cartel — Mexico’s most powerful — and responsible for smuggling more than 3.3 million pounds of marijuana, 20,000 pounds of cocaine and 10,000 pounds of heroin into the U.S. through Arizona over the past five years, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Their efforts in that time generated an estimated $2 billion, according to ICE.

In the three busts combined, the agencies have arrested 76 suspected smugglers and seized more than 61,000 pounds of pot, about 160 pounds of heroin, about 210 pounds of cocaine, nearly $760,000 in cash, and 108 weapons, including assault rifles and shotguns. The other busts came in mid-September and mid-October.

Remember during Prop 19′s legalization campaign in California when everybody was arguing about just how much marijuana legalization would cripple the Mexican drug traffickers?  Arizona’s Attorney General was saying “The violence that we see in Mexico is fueled 65 to 70 percent by the trade in one drug: marijuana.”  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoting the Drug Czar’s 2006 National Drug Control Strategy that said, “61 percent of that revenue, or $8.5 billion, is directly tied to marijuana export sales” (page 36).  Then the RAND Corporation was studying how much Prop 19 would hurt the Mexican drug traffickers and said, ”This 60% figure is a truly mythical number, one that appeared out of nowhere and that has acquired great authority.  This figure should not be taken seriously.”  The Drug Czar also scoffed at the notion that legalization would hurt eat into Mexican drug traffickers’ profits, saying the marijuana revenue data “was based on 1997 information… we strongly believe we see significantly less than the numbers cited from 14 years ago.”

So how does that jibe with the numbers from this “Operation Pipeline Express”?

By weight, then, over 99% of what was seized and what was estimated to have been trafficked overall was marijuana.  However, there is more profitability in cocaine and heroin than marijuana.  Let’s figure that out by throwing in the ONDCP’s own estimated street value of illegal drugs, as of 2007.  In that report, they place the price of a pound of marijuana between $250 – $6,000, a pound of cocaine at $6,500 – $10,000, and a pound of heroin at $24,000 – $56,000.  If we use the lowest figures for all three drugs, then we only get a total of about $1.2 billion – remember, they said this was a ring responsible for “an estimated $2 billion”.

So let’s give the prohibitionists the best possible scenario: cocaine and heroin that fetch the highest prices recorded in 2007 and the cheapest schwag Mexican brickweed priced at a level that will get us a $2 billion total ($375.76/lb… thanks Excel Goal Seek!)

It’s entirely possible that the Mexican drug trafficking organizations like the Sinaloa cartel make significant profits through other criminal activities not listed here.  It’s also tough to make perfectly accurate claims about an unregulated market.  Based on this “Operation Pipeline Express” data, however, it appears that our prohibition on American grown and sold marijuana is an enormous financial benefit worth at least half or more of the Mexican criminal gangs’ profits.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Mexican Government has allowed domestic marijuana and opium production to climb to record levels. Current Mexican President, Philpe Calderon has been in office since 2006 and has tackled his country’s drug problem with military techniques, a tactic that activists have said is partially responsible for the thousands of deaths at the hands of powerful drug cartels. Military troops that were once used to cut and burn the illegal crops, are now patrolling the streets in cities and towns where the violence associated with drug trafficking has gotten out of hand. Since the military forces are now being used to wage urban warfare against the criminal gangs, the fields of poppies and acreages of marijuana have grown relatively free, tucked away in low population areas of the country.

More here:

Mexican Drug War Being Waged in Urban Areas

This presidential candidate makes perfect logical sense. In DC, that's what they call "unelectable".

(Washington Times) Gov. Gary Johnson: Imagine you are a drug lord in Mexico, making unfathomable profits sending your illegal product to the United States. What is the headline you fear the most? “U.S. to build bigger fence”? “U.S. to send troops to the border”? “U.S. to deploy tanks in El Paso”? No. None of those would give you much pause. They would simply raise the level of difficulty and perhaps cause you to escalate the violence that already has turned the border region into a war zone. But would they stop you or ultimately hurt your bottom line? Probably not.

But what if that drug lord opened his newspaper and read this: “U.S. to legalize and regulate marijuana”? That would ruin his day, and ruin it in a way that could not be fixed with more and bigger guns, higher prices or more murder.

Will legalizing marijuana put the criminal cartels out of business? No. But it will immediately deny them their largest profit center and dramatically reduce not only the role of the United States in their business plans, but also the motivation for waging war along our southern border.

There is some debate about just how much the cartels depend on marijuana profits.  Both sides in the debate have thrown around an estimate that 60% of the cartel’s business depends on marijuana, based on a figure given by the Drug Czar’s office back in 2006.  The Office of National Drug Control Policy has since backed away from that estimate.

Recent media reports have discussed Mexican drug trafficking organization revenues derived from marijuana sales in the United States. The estimate that drug cartels derive 60 percent of their revenue from marijuana transactions, based on data from 1997, was derived from models of marijuana yield and the nature of the drug trafficking business that are dated and may no longer apply. There have been changes in the volume and type of drugs trafficked by these organizations, as well as changes in their markets. Further, Mexican cartels derive revenue from criminal activities such as kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking.

Because of the variety and scope of the cartels’ business, and its illicit and purposefully obscured nature, determining the precise percentage of revenues from marijuana is problematic.

Did they honestly correct a mistake or did they realize the 60% figure they were using to scare people about “dangerous marijuana” backfired when we pointed out legalization would cripple the drug lords’ business?  Either way, is ONDCP really proud to say, in essence, “Yeah, marijuana used to be a majority of what the Mexicans were smuggling back in 1997, but now they’re bringing in more meth, coke, and heroin!”  Hey, great work, Drug Czar!

As for “changes in their markets”, let’s compare American annual use of coke, meth, heroin, and marijuana from 1997 and 2009, from the government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health (coded variables in parenthesis if you’d like to look for yourself):

In layman’s terms, the government is telling you that in 1997, when there were almost 13 million more annual pot smokers than cocaine, heroin, and stimulant users combined, marijuana made up 60% of the Mexican traffickers’ business.  But now in 2009, when there are over 20 million more annual pot smokers than cocaine, heroin, and stimulant users, marijuana is a much smaller part of their overall business.  Over a dozen years, 80% of the 11.5 million person increase in illicit substance use are pot smokers… but marijuana has become less important to the Mexican cartel business model?  I think the only way that could happen is if all those new pot smokers are getting their marijuana domestically… which is kind of making my point, isn’t it?

So, these 1997 models are invalid, according to ONDCP, but they won’t give us any new model to estimate Mexican proceeds from marijuana, because “determining the precise percentage of revenues from marijuana is problematic.”  If so, how do we know the number isn’t greater than 60% now?

The RAND Corporation took a look at the 60% figure and did their own analysis:

 Mexican DTOs’ gross revenues from moving marijuana across the border into the United States and selling it to wholesalers is likely less than $2 billion, and our preferred estimate is closer to $1.5 billion.  Our analysis— though preliminary on this point—suggests that 15–26 percent is a more credible range of the share of drug export revenues attributable to marijuna.

Oh, only 15%-26% of Mexican DTO business is marijuana?  Well, then, no point in legalizing it if it’s not 60% of their business.  Taking away one-sixth to one-quarter of their profits just isn’t worth it, eh?  Look, regardless of what the actual figure is, the entire debate hinges on whether we allow dangerous violent international criminals to profit off a substance far safer than alcohol that we can produce domestically.  Coca and poppies don’t grow well up here and nobody wants trailer park meth labs, but the marijuana industry is something that could revitalize the American economy and produce much needed jobs.  That 15%-26% RAND estimates is an economic boost any American state could use these days.

I caught an old episode on TV the other night.  ”Hannibal” had disguised himself as a Mexican to uncover some sort of smuggling ring.  His face was made-up with an awful brown makeup and his silver hair was brownish-red and made me laugh out loud, wondering if a brownface routine like this would get a show cancelled today.

After I tweeted that thought a follower replied, asking if I’d seen the original pilot, “Mexican Slayride”, where the A-Team’s plan to foil a dastardly Mexican drug lord holding a journalist hostage involved spraying bleach all over a Mexican marijuana field. I had not… but now thanks to Hulu (at least through Sept. 2011) you can!

I have to say the fake TV Mexican marijuana farm looks pretty pathetic. And the dastardly Mexican drug lords are far crueler and better armed these days. I think we’ll need more than just the A-Team to defeat them.

Juárez City had 766 more murders last year than the entire state of California.

sunherald Four years after reporting from the front lines of Mexico’s bloody war against drug traffickers, Dan Rather returns to Mexico to speak to some of the country’s top experts and observers about the rising death toll.

More than 34,000 Mexicans have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006, and declared war on drug trafficking.  Critics say this rising death toll is a sign that the U.S.-backed effort is failing.

Dr. Jorge Castaneda, Mexico’s former Foreign Minister, says the cartels will keep growing stronger and richer as long as Americans keep demanding illegal drugs. He offers one bold solution: legalizing drugs.  ”We can start with marijuana,” said Castaneda. “Even the U.S. Embassy here says that 60 percent of profits of the Mexican cartels come from marijuana.  Let’s say it’s 40 percent.  Solving 40 percent of any problem these days is not bad.”

Rather also speaks to courageous reporters who have risked their lives shining a light on Mexico’s shadowy underworld.  Anabel Hernandez faced death threats after publishing a book linking drug traffickers to Mexican government officials and businessmen and now is protected by bodyguards 24 hours a day.  She has no regrets.

“I believe that we have to fight for our freedom, for the freedom to talk, for the freedom to denounce the corruption,” she said.

“Dan Rather Reports: Mexican Standoff” premieres on tomorrow night HDNet, Tuesday, March 29 at 8:00 p.m. ET with an encore at 11:00 p.m. ET.