by Hillary Bricken. Marijuana legalization has already led to many benefits in the United States, ranging from increased tax revenues to decreased cannabis use by minors. Marijuana legalization is also putting a dent into what the Department of Justice calls the “greatest organized crime threat to the United States,” the Mexican drug cartels. ... MORE
by Carly Schwartz. British businessman Richard Branson and U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg have advocated for drug policy reform in the past. But experts say their op-ed calling on the U.K. to end the war on drugs, published Tuesday in The Guardian, is especially noteworthy as British elections near. "Doing this in advance of the election is ... MORE
The free market will always defeat the black market. The growth of the U.S. marijuana industry has devastated drug cartels
in Mexico, evidenced by fewer seizures of cannabis at the border and,
according to Mexican security forces, a drop in total homicides and
domestic marijuana production rates. Mexican drug cartels ... MORE
by Mark Stockley. The Dark Web is reflecting a little more light these days. On Monday I wrote about Memex, DARPA's Deep Web search engine.
Memex is a sophisticated tool set that has been in the hands of a few
select law enforcement agencies for a year now, but it isn't available
to regular users like you and me. There is another search engine ... MORE
by Radley Balko. Another drug war success:
Meth is cheaper, more potent than ever, and it’s all coming in through
international drug cartels. But hey, at least we’ve made life difficult
for allergy sufferers and arrested the occasional innocent parent or
grandparent along the way. Meanwhile in Britain, an MDMA crackdown has given rise ... MORE
Unintended consequences of DEA dictating health care. After the DEA ruled to make hydrocodone a schedule two drug, some health officials became concerned abusers would find more dangerous ways to feed their addiction. Now that hydrocodone isn't easily accessible, those who abused it aren't able to meet their addiction needs, ... MORE
Will gov't tax drive pot back to the black market? Taxes on marijuana are big, and it’s easy to see why. A discussion about legalizing marijuana often segues into one about tax revenues. Marijuana for medical use is legal in 23 states and the District of Columbia. Recreational marijuana is legal in DC and in four states, Colorado, ... MORE
by Shane Ferro. Italy is no longer in a recession, thanks to its black market. Because the European Union changed the way it calculates GDP to include illegal revenue from things like underground alcohol sales, drugs, and prostitution, Italy found out Wednesday that its 0.1% GDP decline in the first quarter of 2014 was actually flat— or 0.0% ... MORE
by John W. Whitehead. Eighteen-year-old Hannah Graham is not the first girl to vanish in America without a trace—my hometown of Charlottesville, Va., has had five women go missing over the span of five years—and it is doubtful she will be the last. I say doubtful because America is in the grip of a highly profitable, highly organized ... MORE
by Somini Sengupta. A coalition of political figures from around the world, including Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, and several former European and Latin American presidents,
is urging governments to decriminalize a variety of illegal drugs and
set up regulated drug markets within their own countries. The proposal ... MORE
by Randall Holcombe. Fighting the big government fight. As an apparently war-minded people, Americans (or at least, our American political leaders) have been comfortable framing parts of the domestic policy agenda as wars for decades. Two of the most prominent have been the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs. Despite the ... MORE
from InformationLiberation: Orange County, Florida sheriff's deputies waging an armed raid for a suspected pot dealer entered a family's home guns blazing and shot a teen girl and her dog, only to find out the suspect they were looking for hadn't lived in the home for weeks -- despite their claim to have "surveilled" the home extensively ... MORE