Drugs, Law and Conflict

…that I am constantly updating the feed of recommended articles and blog posts on the drug trade, even when not posting! New information is coming out all the time — from articles on the privatization of the drug war to testimony from the US drug czar on national strategy.

Follow the most recent news via the right sidebar, or all stories here directly from Google Reader.

**Photo of police round-up in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Courtesy of Eros Hoagland for TIME. (See full photo slideshow here.)

I wanted to point out a few recent changes to the blog…

1) Recommended Articles and Links

I’ve added a widget on the right side of the blog with recommended news articles, so as to get readers related news faster and more easily. (Thank you, Google Reader!) You can subscribe directly to this RSS feed here.

2) Blogroll

More blogs are now included in the blogroll on the right sidebar, and Mexico blogs have been separated out for clarity. Any recommendations welcome!

3) Focus on law, policy and academic articles

The above changes have the final purpose of allowing posts to focus more on publications and research articles related to drug law and policy, instead of current events. I also hope to expand the resources page to include the various reports from government, IGOs and NGOs I’ve posted, in order to make them more easily searchable.

Hope the changes make the blog more useful and user-friendly. Comments appreciated!

Thank you for your patience during these few weeks of silence. Post-traveling, we experienced some server problems, but are now fully back up. To make up for the absence, and in honor of 4/20, this week will feature a series I’m calling “Best of the Best”: a post a day, focusing in-depth on the most notable events of March and April. Here’s the run-down…

Monday: US domestic policy, or “What it means to tell the truth.”

Tuesday: Small arms trafficking, or “Why does more guns = less crime?”

Wednesday: Latin America, or “The story of the narco-billionaire.”

Thursday: Middle East and Central Asia, or “What’s Hezbollah got to do with drug trafficking?”

Currently traveling with limited access to internet. No lack of news in the drug war, though! Long posts forthcoming…

For now, though, please check out last week’s Economist, which features several important articles under the leader “How to stop the drug wars.” Their conclusion? “Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution.” See leader here, and related articles on the right-hand sidebar.

I’ve been slow on posting as I consider how to make this site the most useful for readers and integrate it with my current work in Mexico. Expect some major changes and updates soon.

For now, for anyone on a job hunt, I inform you that DynCorp is hiring in Mexico! DynCorp International, the Virginia-based private military contractor, is seeking a director for their slice of the Mérida Initiative. According to the job description, DynCorp will be responsible for the “development of the criminal justice sector in Mexico and Central America.” (And yet knowledge of the Spanish language is a “desirable” qualification for the position?!)

The US government has hired DynCorp for work in conflict and post-conflict situations such as Haiti, Bosnia, Colombia and Afghanistan, among others. The company is famous for failing to adequately sanction its employees acting as peacekeepers in Bosnia who ran a sex trafficking ring. More recently, in a review of DynCorp’s work in Iraq, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction criticized their “lax accounting and monitoring procedures,” after finding a series of irregularities–such as a $43.8 million police training camp billed to the State Department that was never used.

Will be watching this closely.