Javier Sicilia's words still ring of poetry, though he says he's stopped writing it. A renowned novelist, essayist, and poet - winner of Mexico's top poetry prize three years ago - Sicilia told mourners gathered at his son's funeral in May 2011 when he read his final poem: "No puedo escribir mas poesia ... la poesia ya no existe en mi."

It's no longer in me.

The murder of his son Juan Francisco last year, an innocent 24-year-old university student found along with six of his friends bound and shot by drug traffickers in Cuernavaca, shook Sicilia's world. With deep anguish also came conviction. With the rallying cry "!Hasta la madre!" Sicilia became the unlikely front man to a people's movement across Mexico, leading peace marches throughout last year to publicly denounce the violence, the cartels, and the government corruption that's allowed the problem to fester.

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The Mexican Mafia Quietly Persists In Our Backyard

Last month's "Project Deliverance" federal drug-trafficking sweep netted arrests and drug seizures across the country - but not in the Alamo City. In the Western District, administered from San Antonio, the operation produced arrests in El Paso, Midland, and Alpine, charging defendants with links to Mexican drug-trafficking organizations out of Ciudad Juarez. Following the sweep, authorities trotted out more ominous assessments. "Drug trafficking across the Southwest border has led to a surge of drugs in neighborhoods across the U.S.," said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI Criminal Investigative Division.

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Shame on our system, it reeks! Harvey Silverglate, a Boston defense lawyer, says the rewards for informers encourages them "not only to sing, but to compose." ["Thank you for not snitching," August 16-22.] It is downright sinister, a crime against humanity, for the medicinal use of cannabis to be suppressed!

Patients all over the world testify to cannabis' help in treating chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, gastrointestinal (GI) tract disorders and HIV/AIDS! Some scientists speculate that cannabinoids play a protective role in the brain, slowing the rate of disease. Studies have shown it to slow the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice: lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia, and in another study THC destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats!

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When you're truly in a narcotic task force's crosshairs, they might give you a signal in the form of a simple rhyme: "Give us three, and we'll set you free." This couplet, most effective when recited by an agent perched on the lip of his chair, muscles tensed and ready, should be interpreted to mean that if you incriminate a handful of marbles law enforcement would rather play with, they'll drop those pending drug charges. And in an era of federal mandatory minimums that work like dispassionate Pez Dispensers handing out tart, 10- year prison bids for such crimes as, say, thinking about dealing America's most commonly used illicit drug, marijuana (a decade for planning, not selling), getting a suspect to "flip" on someone else can be a process smoother than photosynthesis.

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Eric Schlosser, The 'Fast Food Nation' Scribe, Serves Up Leftovers With 'Reefer Madness'

It's an hour before Eric Schlosser is scheduled to speak to the crowd at Bookpeople in Austin, but already the folding chairs are filling with the fans and fanatics. In the front row, a smartly arrayed woman in her 30s sits primly; behind her, 20-somethings munch on snacks and flip through magazines.

Everyone has a crisp copy of Reefer Madness - the hotly anticipated follow-up to the best-selling Fast Food Nation. Anxious Bookpeople employees flutter about with clipboards; Schlosser is twenty minutes late. A steady stream of people ascend the stairs to the off-limits third floor where his entourage is rumored to be. After some time, this reporter is summoned - led through a side passage up to the room where Schlosser sits surrounded by copies of his books.

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Raymundo Aleman defies the televised stereotype of the ostentatious, histrionic lawyer. Dressed in a brown and khaki suit and olive tie, Aleman is unobtrusive and restrained, except for a left leg that tends to jiggle when he's enthused about an issue.

The issues that get him jumping: economic injustice and oppressive drug laws. As the Libertarian candidate for district attorney and a criminal defense lawyer, he's up against a Texas Criminal Justice System that houses 150,000 prisoners, the most of any state. In the November 5 general election he will battle Republican incumbent Susan Reed -- the Democrats haven't fielded a candidate -- for the right to set the tone of the Bexar County justice system.

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Like any war, the War on Drugs has its good soldiers. They include eager volunteers, from the drug czars at the top of the command chain to the beat cops, Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs Service agents out in the field. The war also has reluctant conscripts, such as state and federal judges compelled by mandatory minimum sentencing rules to enforce laws that many see as counterproductive and unjust.

Increasingly, the War on Drugs also has what its partisans might consider traitors -- former soldiers who have become convinced that U.S. drug policy is ineffective, immoral, or some combination of the two. Michael W. Lynch recently spoke with three such figures.

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(Wednesday, March 28, The United States Supreme Court rules on whether marijuana use for medicinal purposes can be a valid defense on charges of marijuana possession. The following article was listed as one of the top 25 censored stories of the year 2000. We reprint it here and pose the question, why would the government want to keep us from knowing this?)

The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February 2000, when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.

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The El Paso-based professor explains how "complex international issues such as undocumented immigration and illegal drug trafficking are reduced to one-sided, domestic border-control problems, and framed as threats to national security, which in turn require strong law enforcement, or even military responses."

Even as Banuelos was struggling to prepare his team for mission JT414-97A, U.S. Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, was pushing a 1997 bill that would have put 10,000 troops on the U.S.-Mexican border. Traficant reintroduced the troop plan this year, and tore a page from Dunn's book when he said on the House floor: "The border is a national security issue, and, by God, the Congress of the United States better start securing our borders." The House passed the Ohio congressman's amendment in June, along with proposals for bigger fences, fancier technology and more agents along the border. The Senate nixed the Traficant plan, but moved to swell the ranks of the Border Patrol from 6,200 to more than 20,000 agents.

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Part 1:

On the day he died, Esequiel Hernandez Jr. took his goats to the river. He let them from their makeshift pens of wire and branch, then shooed them down the dusty lane. They wandered past the ruins of the Spanish mission, through the abandoned U.S. Army post and down a stony bluff to the Rio Grande.

When he reached the crest of the bluff, Hernandez stopped. Behind him lay the mud-red adobe homes and melon-green alfalfa fields of Redford. Before him stretched the Chihuahuan desert, Texas' vast gravel backyard, speckled with squat greasewood bushes and whip-like ocotillo plants. Except for Hernandez, whose goats brought him here late each afternoon, the residents of the little oasis rarely ventured into this no-man's-land.

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