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Sorry, what's our DEA doing this time?

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

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Well, OK, there is one major difference: Although the clinic's main product can be sold legally to any California resident with a medical permit to buy it, the federal government still considers marijuana a Schedule 1 narcotic, as dangerous to the republic as crack cocaine. That means that in addition to the usual entrepreneurial headaches, D'Angelo and his brother Andrew, the clinic's general manager, live in fear of a massive bust by the DEA on whatever pretext -- a catastrophe that would wipe out everything they've built.

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Here are Newt Gingrich's nuanced, compassionate drug policy ideas: Constant drug testing for everyone (especially poor people) and stiff "economic penalties" for use. (Yes, obviously, what poor people need are more ways to incur economic penalties and more barriers to either aid or employment. Newt Gingrich has so many IDEAS.) Also, the U.S. should be more like Singapore, where people carrying enough drugs to qualify for "trafficking" charges are put to death.

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Some would say this proves that better law enforcement is all Mexico needs to end the drug-cartel violence currently drenching its northern states in blood. Or maybe, as Grillo suggests, it merely shows that when the cartels and their associates want to kill someone in El Paso, they first take their victim across the border where, chances are, the murder will never be properly investigated.

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As former peace officer and Iraq veteran Arthur Rizer and co-author Joseph Hartman write, the police arms race has very clearly spread well beyond the urban borders of the only cities to actually be targeted by foreign terrorists.

Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle -- the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.

The extent of this weapon "inflation" does not stop with high-powered rifles, either. In recent years, police departments both large and small have acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even armored vehicles (mini-tanks) for use in domestic police work.

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"This is such a cool state," Perry says, referring to New Hampshire, not "intoxication."

How to explain this? Perry isn't a great public speaker, but he's usually not a slurring, incoherent one. At a National Journal panel, Democratic consultant Steve McMahon thought perhaps Perry was drunk. He sounds a bit drunk. But who gets drunk before giving a speech in New Hampshire? This isn't the Golden Globes, this is a presidential campaign.

Republican Charlie Black suggests a different substance:

"It's odd," Black said of the speech. "I haven't asked anybody in Governor Perry's campaign about it. Look, he's got a back problem, maybe it was back medicine ... ."

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Now, with the announcement last week by California's four U.S. attorneys that pot dispensaries will be targeted with harsh criminal sanctions, the shift feared by drug policy reform advocates appears to have come to pass. The rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama about not prioritizing medical marijuana cases now seems a distant memory.

To learn more about what's happening in California, I spoke to Bob Egelko, a veteran reporter who covers courts for the San Francisco Chronicle and has been following the story.

Starting with the basics, what is the medical marijuana law in California and what does it allow for?

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In March 2010, Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna said his state was “losing more people to prescription drug overdoses in a typical year than to traffic accidents.” In Florida, the Medical Examiners commission found more than 1,500 people died of Oxycodone overdose  in 2010, a four-fold increase over the 350 who died in 2005. The supply of Oxycodone, says Jim Hall, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Substance Abuse at Nova Southeastern University, went “far beyond the legitimate medical need of the state.”

The epidemic is not likely to abate soon. The explosion of pain management clinics in Florida, dubbed “pill mills,” prompted the state Legislature last year to close a loophole that had allowed physicians to fill Oxy prescriptions on the spot. Authorities say a half-billion doses of Oxycodone and its generic equivalents were distributed in the state during 2009 alone. An unknown number wound up in the hands of “patients” who had come from out of state to have prescriptions filled by multiple pill mills, before driving home to resell the pills on the black market.

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Such idiocy is the product of many variables. There's been interest-group maneuvering and temperance-movement hypocrisy. There's been hippie-hating rage and reefer-madness paranoia. And, most invisibly, there's been college.

Though little noticed for its role in America's selective War on Drugs, the university system has now become a key player shotgunning the oxymoronic "alcohol is acceptable but pot is evil" mentality down the beer-bong-primed throats of America's youth. To see how it all works, consider the University of Colorado.

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2. Anti-anti drug poster of the day: Whoever made this Swedish anti-drug ad featuring a haggard Amy Winehouse should go to Bad Taste Jail.

3. Bros before other bros of the day: Tim Gunn recounts how he dumped his last boyfriend because he was a flight attendant and a friend told him that would be "such a cliché."

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When I walked back into the house, I was in shock. It had been a month and a half since I had crossed through the threshold into the historic home that housed the ragtag group of people who had once been considered closer than family.

The living room looked nothing like the hazy recollection of nights and early mornings I had in my head. The couch that had felt like a throne sat sagging and filthy against the wall.

Cigarette ash was piled around the arms of the sofa. I glanced up the stairs, but was distracted by the dried dark brown handprints that were smudged and trailing the walls up the once grand staircase.

I know they weren't mine. But they were a grim reminder of what had happened behind my bedroom door at the top of the stairs.

In the next room, I found a couple who had been my good friends watching Judge Judy and smoking from my hookah.

"Is everyone still asleep?" I asked, but I was met with blank stares. It took them a few minutes, trying to focus on me to realize who I was.

"You came back?" asked the dazed man, Joe. His scruffy beard looked more ragged than I remembered. My eyes wandered to his exposed arms. The marks looked familiar, but the vastness of the bruises were a sad reminder of where I could have easily ended up.

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Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez also is a suspect in last year's slaying of a U.S. consulate employee near a border crossing in Ciudad Juarez.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said through his Twitter account that Acosta's capture is "the biggest blow" to organized crime in Ciudad Juarez since he sent about 5,000 federal police to the city in April 2010 to try to curb violence in one of the world's most dangerous cities.

Acosta, 33, was caught Friday in the northern city of Chihuahua along with his bodyguard, said Ramon Pequeno, head of the federal police anti-drug unit. Without offering details on the capture, he said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration helped by providing information. Acosta's arrest was not confirmed until Sunday, just before officials displayed him to journalists in Mexico City.

Wearing a long-sleeve dress shirt, the short man with a cleft chin and thick eyebrows limped as he was escorted by two masked federal police officers to stand before the cameras.

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I first came to terms with being an alcoholic at 27. But even when I quit drinking, recklessness beckoned: I still did too much of everything -- staying up late, speeding on my bike, being careless with my body and my health. Even my pregnancy didn't slow down me down. I was the woman with the hugely swollen belly dragging buggies filled with grocery bags and potted plants balanced precariously on top of them. I would not rest; I had a beautiful garden that year. 

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A good place to start learning the lesson is the Grammy Awards nominating committee. Did they have any problem or pause whatsoever in emptying their cabinet of awards for such a song or such a character?

Did one judge say: "Wait, I think we might be sending the wrong message here"? Or, rather, did they do everything they could to get her to the Grammy Awards even after she was barred from entering the United States? The answer is the latter -- and she appeared for her awards by video feed from Great Britain.

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Even without knowing the exact cause of death, there really is very little doubt as to what ended the life of the diva most famous for refusing to go to rehab. I'm sure my first impression of "Well I saw that one coming" upon hearing the news was hardly unique.

Winehouse had attended rehab on at least three occasions even though her bluesy, instant hit "Rehab" emphatically stated, "No, no, no." Multiple incidences of staggering intoxication during performances and well-publicized events of drug-induced insanity made it clear this woman was having serious trouble with substances.

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And while the recent deaths of two of the show's alums isn't truly damning evidence (the drug and alcohol relapse rate in America ranges between 50 and 90 percent) it had the effect of turning the spotlight into a double-edged sword. His critics used Mike Starr and Jeff Conaway's overdoses to highlight how ineffectual Pinsky's program actually was, and suddenly the show's notoriety became its biggest problem.

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The Justice Department memo, sent to U.S. attorneys around the nation, addresses a central problem with the growing number of states that have legalized medical marijuana: The drug remains illegal under federal law, whether used for medical purposes or not. The new guidance memo reiterates the illegality of medical marijuana and appears to encourage prosecutors to go after some marijuana dispensaries, particularly the large operations.

President Obama suggested during the campaign in 2007-08 that his Justice Department would not prioritize going after medical marijuana. To find out more about the new medical marijuana memo, and for an update on the broader drug war, I spoke to Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which lobbies for alternatives to the drug war.

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