According to a story published today by Fox News Latino, the legal marijuana market in Colorado is partially responsible for decreased Mexican drug cartel activity within the U.S. and along the border. Legal marijuana in Colorado seems to have helped with resolving the problem of drugs in Mexico, says the report, citing the pro-marijuana Weed Blog, which says that over the past two years trafficking of the drug by Mexican cartels has dropped by "up to 70 percent." An official report by the U.S. Drug…

MPP’s Executive Director, Rob Kampia, wrote an article for the Huffington Post this week discrediting three common myths about the marijuana lobby most often spread by prohibitionists. It's important for all of us to keep our eye on the prize by agreeing that marijuana should be legal for people 21 and older; we'll put cartels and gangs out of business, and we'll have reasonable restrictions on advertising. None of this is new. Anyone who believes that alcohol should be legal should also agree that…

Last Friday, the Organization of American States (OAS) gathered in Bogotá, Colombia for the release of its $2 million report, ”The Drug Problem in the Americas,” which characterized marijuana as a relatively benign drug. The 400-page study concluded that if the United States was sincere in its desire to reduce drug violence in the western hemisphere, then it would have to seriously rethink its stance on marijuana and look into more rational drug policies: “It would be worthwhile to assess existing…

Like a lot of people, my morning routine involves clicking around a few major news sites to see what people are talking about that day. Disgusting cruise ships and exploding Russian meteorites aside, one of the stories that caught my eye today was a CNN.com story about Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head of the notorious Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Yesterday, the Chicago Crime Commission named Guzman “Public Enemy Number One,” a title CNN notes was created for bootlegger and gangster Al Capone. Not…

Earlier today, the Obama administration released its annual National Drug Control Strategy, detailing the methods and budgets planned to combat drug use for fiscal year 2013. The report stresses that more resources need to be spent on addiction treatment and prevention, and that an enforcement-centric “war on drugs” is unworkable. The report shows, however, that budget allocations for traditional law enforcement methods could increase by hundreds of millions of dollars, including domestic military…

One of the most often-heard arguments against marijuana reform can basically be summed up as follows: “But what about the children?” Prohibitionists are quick to trot this one out whenever their other arguments have failed because it’s an easy way to elicit a strong emotional response. They claim that marijuana reform will lead to increased rates of use, developmental damage, and easier access to marijuana. Even talking about the issue will lead to higher rates of use, according to their arguments.…

The drug war claimed another victim this week, this time in the form of organized professional sports. On Wednesday, February 2, the LPGA Tour announced that it would postpone the Tres Marias Championship, which was to be held in Morelia, Mexico. Tour officials stated that their security firm determined that safety issues surrounding the event are “too severe” to have the event this year, and in order to hold the event in future years, things would have to “improve dramatically.” I’ll be the first…

If you believe most headline writers, yesterday the RAND Corporation released a study that said ending marijuana prohibition in California would do little to take away profits from Mexican drug cartels. But if you take the time to actually read the study, you’ll learn that Mexican cartels make billions of dollars from exporting marijuana to the United States (not including profits from the marijuana they grow within our borders), that a statistic originally put forward by the U.S. drug czar’s office…

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said this weekend that “[t]ransnational drug trafficking organizations operating from Mexico represent the most immediate national security threat faced by the United States in the Western Hemisphere.” Gee, if only there were some way to cut off their largest source of revenue … Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is reportedly using a $7 million surveillance plane to spy on marijuana grows in Colorado. Glad to see they've got their priorities right.

Two must-read op-eds from last week explain why ending marijuana prohibition is perhaps the only effective way to curtail the ever-increasing violence plaguing Mexico: In The Washington Post, Hector Aguilar Camín, publisher of the Mexican magazine Nexos, and Jorge G. Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister who teaches at New York University, write that California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana for adults, “may, at long last, offer Mexico the promise of an exit from our costly…