I’m going there for the week starting tomorrow. So I won’t be posting.

Behave yourselves.

So Canada has basically decriminalized marijuana possession and Mexico has added cocaine, meth, heroin and LSD to the mix.

Wonder what’s going to happen in the US in the next decade…especially given the current reality in California where shops are selling pot out in the open?

The Daily Beast has more…

In an effort to garner control in the battle against drug traffickers, Mexico has passed a new law that decriminalizes small amounts of drugs by setting maximum “personal use” amounts on marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and methamphetamine. A person will no longer be arrested if found with 5 grams of marijuana (or 4 joints), a half-gram for cocaine (or 4 lines), 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine, or 0.015 milligrams of LSD.

But the Mexican government is quick to point out that the difference between decriminalization and…

“This is not legalization,” assured Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the attorney general’s office. “This is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty.” Under the new law, anyone caught with drug quantities below the limit will be encouraged to seek treatment, until the third time a person is caught when treatment becomes mandatory.

You know, I think that’s actually a pretty good policy, with the exception of marijuana being a drug that needs mandatory treatment. I mean, if somebody is walking around drunk a few times, will cops stop them? Of course not. Marijuana is far less harmful than alcohol, but the stigma exists and so it goes.

Also, how many LSD addicts are out there? 5? I mean…come on. Maybe that provision was made for the rich kids in Mexico City and the Turistas in Cancun. Hrmmm…

In any event, I think this a good, common sense step forward to make sure that non-violent drug offenders aren’t rammed-rodded through the system and have to serve unnecessary jail time.

…and the libertarians and liberals did cheer…

While the world already deals with an ongoing global recession, there are concerns the worst is yet to come. The swine flu, which has killed dozens in Mexico, may become a deadly pandemic. Or maybe not:

“What makes this so difficult is we may be somewhere between an important but yet still uneventful public health occurrence here — with something that could literally die out over the next couple of weeks and never show up again — or this could be the opening act of a full-fledged influenza pandemic,” said Michael Osterholm, a prominent expert on global flu outbreaks with the University of Minnesota.

“We have no clue right now where we are between those two extremes. That’s the problem,” he said.

No one knows how serious this strain of flu is and there’s no understanding yet as to why there have been so many deaths in Mexico while all those infected in the U.S. have recovered. But we can’t just concern ourselves with the potential for catastrophic deaths, we must also concern ourselves with the potential for panic.

Here in the San Antonio area, officials closed a high school after a third students developed swine flu (the first two were the earliest Texas cases and both recovered). The local news did one of those door-to-door neighborhood segments in which they stick a mic into people’s faces and ask such professional questions as “How does it make you feel? Scary isn’t it?”

If this flu turns out to be a lingering problem, the kind of exploitation witnessed by the local news here can’t be how the media behave as a whole.

In a potential crisis, calm delivery of the facts is essential. But I fear the media have lost the ability to report on anything without sensationalizing the facts. Playing on our fears has proved such a reliable way to get our attention that I fully expect the cable news outlets to soon have theme music and spinning graphics for their “Pandemic Reports”. Even if this virus ends up being no worse than the typical flu, the media could create, if not outright panic, at least a level of unease that turns us all into agoraphobics. The last thing our economy needs is for everyone to start staying home.

Of course, if the swine flu does become catastrophically deadly, my concerns about media representation will seem pointless. We’ll have far greater worries than how sensational our news is. But that’s a scenario we all hope will be avoided.

The news about the flu is scary enough, but to think that the leader of the free world may have been exposed to this newly mutated virus is disturbing.

To be clear, this hasn’t been confirmed and the man in the picture isn’t the one who died, but that is the same museum Obama was in when he greeted the man.

So I realize that the title isn’t entirely accurate, just read this from Bloomberg:

The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

And here’s what Mexico is doing to try and contain it…

The Mexican government is distributing breathing masks to curtail the disease’s spread. There is no vaccine against the new strain of swine flu, health authorities said.

Museums, theaters and other venues in the Mexico City area, where large crowds gather, have shut down voluntarily and concerts and other events canceled to help contain the disease. Two professional soccer games will be played tomorrow in different Mexico City stadiums without any fans, El Universal newspaper reported. Catholic masses will be held, the newspaper said, although church officials urged worshipers to wear breath masks and to avoid contact.

Schools will likely remain closed next week, Calderon said in the Oaxaca speech. The decree allows Calderon to regulate transportation, enter any home or building for inspection, order quarantines and assign any task to all federal, state and local authorities as well as health professionals to combat the disease.

Again, very scary stuff and I’ll try to keep everybody up to date with what’s going on.

With Obama visiting Mexico today, I thought it would be topical to share some pretty shocking stats/facts about the country.

GlobalPost has 10 factoids and here are the first 3…

1. A recent U.S. government report suggests that “Two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.”
2. Mexico has one of the highest kidnapping rates in the world: An average of 70 people are abducted each month.
3. More than 1,100 guns found discarded at Mexico shooting scenes or confiscated from cartel gangsters were traced to Texas gun merchants in 2007.

Eventually we’re going to have to do something about Mexico and that porous border of ours. I’ve heard folks say that completely gating it up isn’t an option, but until that gets solved, how can we have a realistic immigration/amnesty policy?

Basically, I just don’t think it’s realistic to think about one without the other, and hopefully Obama gets that.

By the same token, I hope the anti-immigration forces realize that we can’t boot tens of millions out of this country.