After a year of researching, interviewing experts, holding meetings and debates, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy publishes its final report, evaluating the current Drug Policy and its impacts on the Region. From the struggle against narcotics to the international interactions associated with this issue, including the efforts to curb illicit drug porduction, transportation and commerce, this document sets the Latin American countries in the international drug trafficking context, exposing failures and successes, and shedding light on ways to end this scourge.

To read the full Report, click this link

By Clive Crook
Financial Times - April 12 2009 

How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm.

By Mike Gray*

Washington Post - Sunday, April 12, 2009

In 1932, Alphonse Capone, an influential businessman then living in Chicago, used to drive through the city in a caravan of armor-plated limos built to his specifications by General Motors. Submachine-gun-toting associates led the motorcade and brought up the rear. It is a measure of how thoroughly the mob mentality had permeated everyday life that this was considered normal.

Capone and his boys were agents of misguided policy. Ninety years ago, the United States tried to cure the national thirst for alcohol, and it led to an explosion of violence unlike anything we’d ever seen. Today, it’s hard to ignore the echoes of Prohibition in the drug-related mayhem along our southern border. Over the past 15 months, there have been 7,200 drug-war deaths in Mexico alone, as the government there battles an army of killers that would scare the pants off Al Capone.

Now U.S. officials are warning that the vandals may be headed in this direction. Too late: They’re already here. And they’re in a good position to take over organized crime in this country as well.