"More and more people are realizing that it makes sense to choose licensed, regulated, and taxed marijuana businesses over the drug cartels," said Mike Elliott, head of the Colorado-based Marijuana Industry Group.
My impression of Gary Webb was that, in addition to being a novice to tumultuous Central American politics, he was dead set on his thesis that the Contras originated the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States.
MEXICO CITY – Mexican soldiers have captured Héctor Beltrán Leyva, one of the country's most-wanted men and a suspected drug-cartel kingpin who had a bounty of more than $7 million on his head, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Cocaine seems to be falling from the sky in Costa Rica, as cops in the past 24 hours have seized more than a metric ton of cocaine in separate operations throughout the country.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – This year’s highly publicized influx of child migrants from Central America via Mexico to the U.S. border has sparked intense debate about the proliferation of gangs in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. But efforts by the three countries to eliminate gang violence have been ineffective and often counterproductive.
In a wide-ranging speech Tuesday at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza said the 35 OAS member nations no longer see the drug problem as a public safety matter but rather as a public health issue. Authorities also want alternatives to jailing drug addicts, he said.
"Anti-drug policies in Central America have not had their desired effect,” Public Security Minister Celso Gamboa said. "I can say that after 20 years experience fighting drug trafficking, ... the cases where white collar criminals are caught, those who never touch the drugs, these cases are scarce.”
The argument goes like this: A small country like Costa Rica cannot protect itself from highly armed drug lords without the help of the United States. We need to train police at places like the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas.
It is a job that has previously been held by law enforcement officials, a military general and physicians. But for now, it is occupied by a recovering addict.
