Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw recently asked state lawmakers to install license-plate-reader cameras on Texas roadways and to allow stationery roadblocks to stop motorists so DPS could see their drivers' licenses and proof of insurance.

McCraw wrapped these intrusive proposals in a generalized assertion of growing drug trafficking and violence during a state Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee meeting. He wants license-plate readers mounted on highway signs and in DPS cars, claiming they would help track stolen vehicles, which gangs and drug cartels often use to smuggle drugs. He told senators that drug cartels take billions of dollars worth of U.S. drug sales back to Mexico, and DPS must expand its focus beyond the border to "crime corridors."

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As he demonstrated when he visited Austin recently, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico has a deft understanding of Mexico's complicated challenges but he continues to overlook what would be a killer blow to the wrenching violence in the country.

In a recent speech at the LBJ Library, Carlos Pascual identified drug cartels as Mexico's chief source of insecurity. While presenting suggestions for limiting their power -- including a reduction in U.S. demand for illegal drugs -- he failed to mention the best way of combating the cartels: take their business away.

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AUSTIN - Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday he would support sending U.S. troops into Mexico to fight the drug war.

The Republican has long urged beefed-up security on the American side of the violence-plagued border, but he said stronger tactics are needed to defeat the drug cartels.

"You have a situation on the border where American citizens are being killed, and you didn't see that back when George Bush was the governor," Perry said in an interview with MSNBC.

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In a Small East Texas Town, One Man Fights for His Right to Medical Marijuana-and Suffers the Consequences.

Off of a dead-end street in the lush woodlands of East Texas, Chris Cain rides his motorized wheelchair to his trailer's front door and pushes it open with his wrist. With his barking Chihuahua trailing behind, he spins and leads me toward his office space, excusing the place's appearance. "It's been through two hurricanes and two police raids. It's had it," he drawls. In his living room, worn couches face a big-screen television. With a goatee and shoulder-length hair, Cain, 41, calls himself a "rocker."

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Ponderous cargo inspections on the U.S.-Mexico border are killing commerce and will hurt America's overall economy, a national security expert said Tuesday in El Paso.

Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, a former U.S. drug czar and member of President Clinton's Cabinet, said the United States should break bottlenecks at the border by limiting inspections. Most of these checks of cargo can be carried out in the interior of the United States and Mexico, he said.

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One day the latest two victims are Mexican and the next day they are American citizens. Borunda/Ybarra, please get your story straight before printing it.

My feeling goes to the parents of these two young men. I lost a child myself.

Now, please do not blame UTEP for what is happening to these students. They chose to live in Juarez, and no one knows what is going on once they are in there.

Just remember one thing. I believe that we are going to see a lot more killing right here in El Paso.

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FORT WORTH - About 15 people slipped behind a partitioned-off section of a downtown Fort Worth restaurant Sunday morning to hear Dallas police Officer Nick Novello and others support the legalization of marijuana.

"The war on drugs today has left carnage," Novello said.

The seminar's host, Medcan University, a for-profit business, is trying to build a coalition of residents in favor of legalizing marijuana use for the critically or chronically ill in Texas. The seminars, held periodically throughout Texas, cover the politics, laws and science behind the medical marijuana movement.

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There's an apparent disconnect -- from hierarchy down to field agents - -- in our country's endeavor to keep U.S. firearms out of the ongoing drug wars in Mexico.

A Department of Justice review indicates at least three problems we must face:

Agents in the field have their focus on small gun dealers rather than on large-scale smuggling rings.

However, funding has been cut in some gun-tracing operations.

And information between agencies is not being adequately shared. That includes not sharing with counterparts in Mexico.

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Mexican and U.S. newspaper editors will travel to El Paso in December for a summit about violence against journalists on the border.

The American Society of News Editors will host the two-day conference Dec. 5-6 at the University of Texas at El Paso.

The Inter American Press Association is also organizing the summit, which will offer presentations in both English and Spanish. The El Paso Times and The Associated Press are sponsors of the conference.

The program was developed by executives such as Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News; Anders Gyllenhaal, vice president of the McClatchy Company; and Alfredo Carbajal, managing editor of the Spanish-language daily Al Dia in Dallas.

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Four homicides have occurred so far this year in El Paso, and that's an amazing statistic. It's all the more amazing because mere feet away across the border, Juarez has experienced more than 2,500 deaths so far this year because of the endemic violence there.

El Paso's homicide number is a tribute to an effective police force and a five-letter word that describes the relationship between police and the community -- trust.

Mayor John Cook said, "The big difference between El Paso and Juarez - -- and I have to present this argument all the time -- in El Paso, we trust the police."

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UTEP students clung to one another and wept outside the Business Administration building Monday as they mourned the deaths of two students who were killed in Juarez last week.

The students, Manuel Acosta Villalobos, 22, and Eder Diaz Otero, 23, were attacked by gunmen outside Diaz's house in colonia Rincones de Santa Rita about 8 p.m. Nov. 2. Their assailants fired 36 rounds, hitting the men multiple times, according to a Chihuahua state police report.

The memorial service for Acosta and Diaz took place between UTEP's Business Administration building

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Proposition 19 did not pass in the California elections last week. The proposition, if passed, would have given Californians over the age of 21 the right to possess up to one ounce of marijuana and smoke it in non-public areas as long as minors were not present. Arguments for legalizing marijuana in California were that the drug would help decrease the state's debt and decrease drug war violence. However, there is no substantial evidence that supports these outrageous claims.

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Bedford and Euless have joined other Metroplex cities in banning the sale and possession of K2, the synthetic product that users smoke to get a high similar to marijuana.

The Bedford City Council adopted an ordinance Oct 12 out of concern that the city might become an island in the midst of municipalities that banned K2, said Police Chief David Flory.

"We didn't want to be the only ones who didn't have an ordinance, [becoming] a safe haven to do K2," Flory said.

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The rush by numerous communities in the Big Country to ban the sale of synthetic marijuana has intensified, but Abilene officials are digging in their heels and hoping laws banning the sale of the substance will be enacted by state legislators in the 2011 session.

During last week's City Council meeting, Mayor Norm Archibald encouraged residents to contact their legislators to consider a statewide ban on synthetic cannabis, known by brand names K2 or Spice.

"I feel this issue could get priority treatment," Archibald said.

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Tunnels under the border between Mexico and the United States aren't really unusual. Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that since the early 1990s, 125 tunnels have been found at various points along the border. Seventy-five of those have been discovered in the past four years.

The latest tunnel, running under the California-Mexico border, was busted Tuesday and 20 tons of marijuana was found on the U.S. side of the border and four tons turned up on the Mexican side.

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A fellow with the Brookings Institution said Friday that younger, more out-of-control hit men working for Mexican drug cartels are one reason more massacres are taking place, including a recent attack on buses carrying maquiladora workers in Juarez.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow in foreign policy at Washington-based Brookings, was the luncheon keynote speaker at a conference about manufacturing ties between Mexico and the United States hosted by the El Paso branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

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On Tuesday, prohibitionists once again managed to hold a fraying line when Californians defeated Proposition 19, which would have legalized the production, sale and use of small quantities of marijuana by people 21 or older.

Though disappointed by the results, Prop 19 supporters have considerable cause for optimism.

The approximately 46 percent of those who approved the measure was overweighted with younger voters.

For them, legalization is a matter of when, not if. That assessment is supported by the ease with which Californians can already obtain cannabis legally at hundreds of medical dispensaries in the state and by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recently signing into law a bill that reduces the penalties for marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to an infraction comparable to a traffic ticket.

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The University of Houston was awash in marijuana when I got my MA (Sociology) in the '70s. It largely replaced alcohol among grad students - also at St. Thomas later.

Hope grew after the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse reports of 1972 and 1973 laid out the facts so well, but stuff happens - read insanity, panic and propaganda.

Zeke Barrera is right on many counts. Prop 19 in California - which was financed by my friend and former Houstonian, Richard Lee - is just the first step in a process.

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The U.S. and Mexico are using an Internet-based system to help Mexican authorities continue their battle against violence and gun-trafficking by drug cartels.

The system, an electronic tracing system called Spanish e-Trace, allows law enforcement agencies to submit firearm trace requests to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' National Tracing Center, where agents can analyze trends in the movement of weapons to Mexico and other countries.

It was designed to assist Mexican investigators who are tracing firearms known to originate in the U.S., according to a May 2010 State Department report.

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El Paso will continue to suffer an inaccurate image as a violent city because of its proximity to Juarez until the federal government secures the border, Gov. Rick Perry said while campaigning Friday.

Perry, in El Paso on the last day of early voting, said misconceptions about El Paso could be eliminated if the federal government helped Mexico in its war against drug cartels and increased law enforcement along the border.

Local leaders have said that while El Paso is the second-safest large city in the nation, the cartel violence in Juarez has created a false impression about the city that could make it difficult to recruit business and tourism dollars. They said they need help from state officials to spread the word that El Paso is safe despite the chaos in its sister city.

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