THE OBAMA administration has shied away from issues involving the regulation of guns. Now comes word from The Post's James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz that the Justice Department is advancing a plan to stem the flow of semiautomatic rifles to violence-plagued Mexico. It's about time.

Over the past three years, some 30,000 people have been gunned down in Mexico in attacks fueled by drug cartels. Military and law enforcement officers there have seized some 60,000 weapons that were used in these crimes and traced to the United States. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has pleaded with U.S. officials to step up enforcement of gun laws and reinstate the assault-weapons ban. Doing so would be good policy but would trigger a fierce fight. For the moment, the administration has something much more modest in mind.

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BOSTON - In the upcoming California referendum on legalizing marijuana for recreational use, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske have something in common. Both are missing the forest for the weed.

According to recent polls, Californians are on the verge of approving the legalization of marijuana and overthrowing nearly a century of failed American drug prohibition. Hail to the Golden State.

In the four decades since President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs," the toll of prohibition includes at least $1 trillion in taxes spent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Worse are the millions of lives damaged by prison time and street violence. In 2007, for example, about 500,000 people were in jail on drug charges.

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SECRETARY OF STATE Hillary Rodham Clinton caused a stir last week by suggesting that Mexico's drug-trafficking gangs were beginning to resemble an insurgency, like that which has plagued Colombia. She's right in the sense that the cartels have come to effectively control parts of the country, where they "attempt to replace the state," as Mexican President Felipe Calderon put it last month. Like most insurgencies, the Mexican drug armies also have an external source of funding and weapons. Shamefully, that is the United States.

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MEXICO CITY -- On Nov. 2, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, deciding whether to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. If the initiative passes, it won't just be momentous for California; it may, at long last, offer Mexico the promise of an exit from our costly war on drugs.

The costs of that war have long since reached intolerable levels: more than 28,000 of our fellow citizens dead since late 2006; expenditures well above $10 billion; terrible damage to Mexico's image abroad; human rights violations by government security forces; and ever more crime. In a recent poll by the Mexico City daily Reforma, 67 percent of Mexicans said these costs are unacceptable, while 59 percent said the drug cartels are winning the war.

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GW Needs To Revisit The Medical Marijuana Ban

With the passing of Initiative 59 this spring, medical marijuana became legal in the District. Finally, the D.C. Council realized the lunacy of keeping the substance illegal for medical purposes. But GW administrators clearly still fear the reefer, because they have banned the use or possession of medical marijuana on campus.

While I can sympathize with the University in its mission to keep illicit substances off campus, I can't agree with denying a student with a valid prescription the right to do something that would be perfectly legal anywhere else in the city.

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The District is writing strict new rules to regulate its nascent medical marijuana industry, but some of the entrepreneurs best positioned to lead the way have blemished backgrounds - including drug convictions at odds with the city's vision.

Among the District's 300 proposed rules is a requirement that operators would need to be "of good character": No felony convictions or misdemeanor drug convictions allowed.

"Historically, the people who have dealt with marijuana have, unsurprisingly, come from a noncompliant background, you might say," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the Washington-based National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "They have a compulsion to not follow the law. So these rules might be viewed as just another bump in the road or a minor impediment for these guys."

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Students who are prescribed marijuana under the new D.C. law permitting the drug for medicinal use will not be able to possess or use the drug on campus under the current GW student conduct policies, a University official said in August.

Although medicinal marijuana was approved by the D.C. Council in July, GW's Code of Student Conduct currently prohibits "possession or use of illegal drugs or controlled substances," making it a violation for patients who attend GW to use the drug on campus.

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GIVE MEXICAN President Felipe Calderon credit for honesty as well as courage. Last week he presided over a three-day public conference to assess the results of nearly four years of war against Mexico's drug cartels. Most of the facts were grim:

- -- According to the chief of the national intelligence service, 28,000 people have died violently since Mr. Calderon deployed the Mexican army against the drug gangs in December 2006. That number represents an increase of 3,000 over the death toll the government reported earlier this summer.

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Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn Wants to Be D.C.'S First Legal Medical-Marijuana Dealer. But First He Has to Navigate City Regulators, Well-Financed Competitors, and Suspicious Neighbors.

Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn spent 27 years teaching the Torah in shuls from central New Jersey to southern Australia. Lately, he's been talking a lot about a passage from Leviticus, the part about not standing idle while your neighbor bleeds.

"This really is an important religious issue," says the silver-haired 58-year-old, his wide smile punctuated by crescent-shaped dimples. "Especially because of how people have been suffering and the ways that drug laws have been used against Americans and especially against minorities...I think scripture is very clear that when we have the opportunity to help people, we must do it."

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District liquor regulators will play a lead role in the city's new medical marijuana program when it debuts Jan. 1, according to draft rules issued Friday by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D).

Under the regulations, the city health department would be responsible for registering legal marijuana users. But the licensing and oversight of the facilities that will grow and distribute medical cannabis would be handled by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board and its enforcement arm, the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration. The prospect of having the same regulators overseeing medical marijuana and liquor stores concerns advocates who have fought to have cannabis recognized as a medical treatment, not just as a drug for recreational use.

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Re: "Washington the weed capital would be a bummer," July 30

Instead of making sense of our epic Prohibition II: Reefer Madness, Harry Jaffe only continues the stereotypes left over from the days of Cheech and Chong.

"Pot makes you dumb and forgetful," Mr. Jaffe opines. Really, Harry? I guess our president is "dumb and forgetful," as well as that wacky, lamebrain scientist Carl Sagan. And cannabis (the proper term for marijuana) kept Olympic champion Michael Phelps from being the best he could be, eh?

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D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty plans to leave the nitty-gritty of medical marijuana rules up to three city agencies, according to draft regulations obtained by The Washington Examiner -- but not until next year.

The mayor's office is expected to make the draft order public this week.

Medical marijuana became legal in the District after Congress chose not to override the D.C. Council's law within the 30 days allowed by home rule.

The mayor's draft order calls for the District Department of Health, the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board and the Metropolitan Police Department to share duties of regulating the drug -- but they won't be able to make the rules until Jan. 1, 2011.

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How can it be possible that after 18 months in office, President Obama still has not appointed a director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency charged with monitoring illegal flows of weapons? We know the answer. The administration and Congress are scared of the gun lobby.

It's the kind of situation that makes you wonder if good governance has taken a holiday: Mexico is reeling from a drug-cartel insurgency that is armed mainly with weapons acquired in the United States; Arizona is so frightened about drug violence and other imagined Mexican dangers that its legislature enacted an anti-immigrant law that a federal judge says is unconstitutional.

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My buddy Sam sells weed for a living. Some might disparage him as a dope dealer. He prefers to describe himself as an importer of agricultural goods from California.

"I provide a quality product, demand is high, and I rarely have to search for clients," he says.

This being the first weekend when some D.C. residents can legally catch a buzz, since Congress didn't kill the city's new medical marijuana bill, I asked Sam if he was worried about the competition from city-sanctioned pot dispensaries.

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As a street cop who worked the trenches of the drug war spanning three decades, I heartily agree with the observations of Sutton Stokes ("Is marijuana legalization finally on the march in the U.S.?" Communities, Tuesday). The prohibition of marijuana and the subsequent arrest of 800,000 citizens, mostly for personal use, means less time for deadly DUI offenders. When detectives are flying around in helicopters trying to find green plants, they are missing the pedophiles who are in the Internet chat rooms making contact with our young teens. We have all seen NBC's "To Catch a Predator." Police labs are not opening 400,000 rape kits and putting the DNA in the computer because proving the green stuff is marijuana is more of a priority.

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ELKINS, West. Va. (7/13/10) -- Apparently the latest scary thing that the kids are doing is smoking something called "K2," which this recent New York Times article describes as "a blend of herbs treated with synthetic marijuana." By packaging K2 as "incense," purveyors "have managed to evade federal regulation," so the stuff is widely, legally available. Only eight states have passed laws banning it to date, and, as soon as bans pass, chemists can quickly sidestep them by making minor tweaks at the molecular level.

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EL PASO -- A former U.S. ambassador to Mexico said Thursday in Washington, D.C., that it will take 10 years for Mexico to break free from the violence that has taken hold and killed about 23,000 people.

John D. Negroponte, ambassador to Mexico from 1989 to 1993, told a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism and the Committee on Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, that fixing Mexico and in turn securing the border will take about that long.

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Re: "President Obama's war on his own 'youthful irresponsibility,'" May 25 This article illustrates some of the reasons why millions of North Americans are hoping and praying that California legalizes cannabis (marijuana) next November. The list of reasons for legalizing pot is growing faster than the plant itself.

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

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In his high school yearbook photo, President Barack Obama sports a white leisure suit and a Travolta-esque collar whose wingspan could put a bystander's eye out. Hey, it was 1979.

Maybe that explains the rest of young Barry's yearbook page, with its "still life" featuring a pack of rolling papers and a shout-out to the "Choom gang." ("Chooming" is Hawaiian slang for smoking pot.)

Far be it from me to condemn our president for harmless (and amusing) youthful indiscretions. As his predecessor put it, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible."

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon will make his first full-fledged visit to Washington this week since taking office 3 1/2 years ago. Given the issues facing their countries, Calderon and President Obama might be tempted to nickel-and-dime their encounter. But the time is a ripe for a "big idea," not unlike what NAFTA -- warts and all -- was when it was proposed in 1990. Instead of narrowing everything down to drugs, security and how the United States can best back Mexico's war, the two countries should "de-narcoticize" their relationship and make their goal Mexico's development and transformation into a middle-class society.

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