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…

Progressive political blog FireDogLake launched its online marijuana legalization campaign yesterday. Complete with a website and an advisory board that includes former law enforcement officers, physicians, and activists, the campaign—called “Just Say Now”—is designed as a “transpartisan” nexus of sorts for the growing nationwide movement to end marijuana prohibition. Partnering with FDL for the campaign is Students For Sensible Drug Policy, which recently made an excellent decision by naming our…

Sensible Washington, a group gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would end marijuana prohibition in Washington state, reported last week that members of West Sound Narcotics Enforcement Team (WestNet), a federally-funded drug task force, seized about 200 signatures during a raid on a medical marijuana club. From Sensible Washington’s site: “We have made repeated calls to WestNet’s office, but have yet to receive any assurance that the task force’s personnel have secured the signed petitions…

The campaign to end marijuana prohibition received a noteworthy endorsement last week, when the head of the second-largest teachers union in the country said that she supports this year’s ballot initiative in California to regulate marijuana. Randi Weingarten, president of the 856,000-member American Federation of Teachers, told HBO’s “Real Time” host, Bill Maher, that “everything in moderation is pretty much fine.” “When something becomes a forbidden fruit,” the 52-year-old told Maher, “you have…