LEAP in the UK

Check out this quick intro video of LEAP speaker Annie Machon, a former MI-5 officer from Britain:

Merry Christmas from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

I would like to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. In addition, I would like to thank three groups of people: our donors, our volunteers and our staff. You have all made an enormous contribution to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition throughout 2010.

With our passion for drug policy reform it is sometimes easy to forget that law enforcement officers do a lot of great work in our communities, both on and off the job. For example, here is a great story from the city of Logan in Utah:

The Logan City Police Department is declaring their Coats for Christmas drive a success. The department started the program seven years ago to assist children in elementary schools who did not have adequate winter clothing while traveling to and from school.

Here is another wonderful Christmas story from Victoria, British Columbia:

A pair of Victoria police officers played Good Samaritans to a 95-year-old man who was discovered living alone in an apartment without heat or lighting, despite having thousands of dollars in uncashed pension cheques.

These acts of kindness remind us of the words of a famous Anglo-American novelist, Taylor Caldwell, who said, "This is the message of Christmas: We are never alone." And as we take a break at the end of this year, and pause in our efforts to change laws that we know are harmful, we can also reflect on the thoughts of Albert Einstein:

"Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes - goodwill among men and peace on earth."

All the best to you and your family during the holidays.

LEAP blog now cell phone friendly

The LEAP blog is now serving a custom page when it detects someone visiting the page with a cell phone. This is a beta feature from Draft in Blogger. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Blogger has come a long way in the past year. They have added a lot of good features. When I first started this blog I used to hand code all of the posts in HTML because I didn't like the WYSIWIG editor they provided. It used to be faster for me to write the HTML myself, but now I use the Compose window almost all the time. In addition, Blogger has added better templates, improved the spam detection on their comment system and they now have a great visitor statistics page as well.

At one point I was thinking about moving this blog to WordPress, but now I'm going to stick with Blogger.

Google Ngram Viewer

Check out this chart by the Google Ngram Viewer. It shows the frequency of the phrase "drug war" rom 1800 to 2008. (Hat tip to Strayan who left a comment about this on Pete Guither's Drug WarRant blog.)

A bus trip in Mexico

One of our blog readers, Garth Kiser, sent me an article he wrote about a trip he took in Mexico. He's posted it to iReport on CNN.com. He was traveling from Chetumal to Tijuana by bus. Early in the trip, the bus goes through the occasional checkpoint:

Come morning we roll into a military checkpoint, officers armed with assault rifles behind sandbag bunkers. All passengers are ordered to exit the bus as the luggage compartments are searched. The soldiers attempt to coax drug sniffing dogs into the compartments with tennis balls on strings but get no K9 compliance. The next stop comes barely 10 miles later. An officer in a pressed white shirt bearing a large gold police star requests to see my Mexican entry card.

This was interesting for me because I've had the opportunity to watch some outstanding K9 dogs at work in Canada and the United States. It takes a lot of good instruction and training for both the dog and handler to get to the point where they can work effectively together. Now there could be any number of reasons why these dogs did not perform on this particular occasion (fatigue, heat, etc). However, I also wonder what kind of ongoing training and practise the handlers and their dogs are receiving.

As he gets closer to Tijuana, there is an increase in the number and severity of the checkpoints:

Fifteen hours north of Mexico City. The intensity of the checkpoints increases dramatically. The bus is boarded one or twice per hour by gangs of unidentified men carrying pockets full of tools. Highway 24, marker 127. A group of 4 surround my seat at the rear of the bus, asking questions and sizing me up with sinister expressions. These people have the look and feel of thugs, not cops. They move back outside but the bus can't yet depart because another group of cop-thugs is dismantling parts of the vehicle's exterior with power drills, looking behind panels and inside the engine compartment.

Garth concludes his article by asking an important question:

Busses are the main form of transportation in Mexico. How can the government allow their infrastructure to suffer so severely? The drugs searched for in Mexico are bound for the USA, not Mexico, so again, why would the Mexican government be willing to cripple a vital transportation infrastructure?

James Gierach in the SouthtownStar

Here's a great article about LEAP board member James Gierach. The SouthtownStar is a newspaper for the south side of Chicago. Here's my favourite quote:

“We’re running out of money,” he said. “That’s why the drug war will end. We just can’t fund it any more.”