Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said Wednesday that an uptick in violent street crime and gang activity in neighborhoods across the city was the impetus for a more than two-year joint local-state-federal task force investigation that ended with 28 defendants sentenced to between three and 27 years in federal prison. "It is a good day for anyone who abhors violence," Acevedo said at a Wednesday afternoon press conference. Investigators with the APD, FBI, Travis Co. Sheriff's Office, Pflugerville PD and several other Central Texas agencies joined with the Texas DPS and Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice's Office of Inspector General to crack down on a cocaine trafficking organization run through the Cinco-Tres gang (or, 5-3, which, broken down, is the 512 area code), a subset of the Bloods gang, said Acevedo. At the helm was Duane Hosea, "the head of the snake, as far as I'm concerned," Acevedo said, who is now spending 27 years in federal prison for his trafficking activities. Hosea was directly tied in with cartels south of the border in Mexico and Honduras, FBI agent Steve Hause said. The goal of the joint investigation was to break down the "entire conspiracy from the streets to Mexico," he said.

Sen. Bob Deuell, a medical doctor and R-Greenville, saw his bill for a needle exchange program for drug addicts – a great and overdue idea – endangered by the Democrats' chubbing in the House, and tried to amend the bill onto another one in order to save it. But Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horsehoe Bay, objected. I still haven't figured out the details, but this objection somehow endangered the main bill, so Deuell reluctantly pulled his amendment down. He then launched into an angry attack on his colleagues' lack of good sense on drug and health policy: "I think its time, especially for you Republicans, that if we're to remain a viable party, we need to start looking at medical facts and dealing with reality and not dealing with black helicopters and other myths that are out there by the right-wing extremists." Fraser was unmoved, joking to the press table that “black helicopters are circling.” He then told a reporter from Quorum Report, “Just because my constituents don’t believe [in] handing out needles to drug addicts doesn’t mean they are part of some black helicopter conspiracy. They just don’t support that sort of program, and neither do I.”

President Barack Obama has not included in his proposed budget a pledge to lift a federal ban on funding for needle exchange. During the primary campaign Obama came out in support of needle exchange as a way to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. "The President will support common sense approaches" to promoting AIDS prevention, the White House website previously boasted. "The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users." Now, however, that pledge has been removed from the website. A White House spokesman told the Huffington Post that the administration isn't quite ready to lift the ban, but that Obama still supports needle exchange. "We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for the change," spokesman Ben LaBolt said. "We are committed to doing this as part of a National HIV/AIDS strategy and are confident that we can build support for these scientifically-based programs" -- they're just not that interested, apparently. Meanwhile, also included in the proposed budget is the so-called Barr Amendment, which blocks Washington, D.C., from implementing a medi-pot law that voters there passed in 1998. At the time, then-Republican Georgia Congressman Bob Barr was so irritated by the 70% voter approval for the measure that he authored the amendment which would strip the District of all funding if officials tried to implement the voter-approved measure. Ironically, in March 2007, Barr changed his tune, joining the Marijuana Policy Project as a lobbyist in order to press for the repeal of his own amendment. So far, it would seem, he hasn't gotten very far.

According to a new poll, a slight majority of Americans now favor legalizing marijuana. The Zogby poll, commissioned by the conservative O'Leary Report, reveals that nearly 52% favor a marijuana tax-and-regulate scheme; just more than 37% said they oppose legalization and 11% said they weren't sure. Pollsters asked whether legalization makes sense in an environment of scarce "law enforcement and prison resources, a desire to neutralize drug cartels and the need for new sources of revenue." The vast majority of political liberals said they would support legalization (79%), while 58% of moderates and 25% of conservatives said they would favor the new approach. Meanwhile, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week said that the time has come to debate legalization. It might not be time to actually do it, "but I think it's time for a debate," he said. "I think all of those ideas of creating extra revenues, I'm always for an open debate on it."

As far as the new top dog for drug policy is concerned, the "War on Drugs" needs to be retired. That's what White House Office of National Drug Control Policy head Gil Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal yesterday: "Regardless of how you try to explain to people its a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country." That is welcome news and certainly suggests that Kerlikowske intends to turn the nation's drug policy around – hopefully in a direction that re-frames the drug "problem" first as one of public health, and that prioritizes treatment and harm reduction, as he suggested he would during his April 1 Senate confirmation hearing. Kerlikowske, who was Seattle Police chief before taking on the ONDCP job, says he does not support drug legalization, but does support needle exchange, which he says is "part of the complete public health model for dealing with addiction."

With New Hampshire poised to become the 14th state to legalize medi-pot -- and similar legislation pending in at least two additional states -- it would seem that the tide is turning in favor of medical cannabis regulation. But what about pot tax-and-regulate schemes? What does the American public say about ending prohibition? Two charts of recent polls -- contrasted with one from 2005 -- put together by the folks at the Marijuana Policy Project suggest that tanker might be starting to turn too...

President Barack Obama supports the adoption of a one-to-one crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing scheme, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer told a Congressional subcommittee this morning, which would finally, officially, kill the infamous 100-to-one sentencing disparity on the books since the 1980s. Obama believes Congress should "completely eliminate the sentencing disparity," Breuer told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs. "[C]riminal laws should be tough, smart, and fair, and perceived as such by the American public."

Texas NORML and Outgrow Big Bro this weekend are hosting the second Texas Cannabis Crusade, featuring a march from Zilker Park's Pecan Grove up to the steps of the Capitol on Saturday, May 2. The festivities kick off at 10am at Zilker with live music and breakfast. The march will begin from there at noon and head up to the Capitol for a concert and rally from 1-4p. The event is part of the nearly 300 city strong Global Marijuana March. In Austin, marijuana crusaders will rally to bring attention to two bills pending at the Legislature: House Bill 902, by Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, which would downgrade minor pot possession to a fine-only offense; and HB 164, by Rep. Elliott Naishtat, D-Austin, which creates an affirmative defense for possession by medi-pot patients using based on the recommendation of a licensed doctor. (The likelihood that either bill -- both perennial measures -- would make it out of the Capitol this year is slim to none. Dutton's measure was heard in committee last month but is still pending there, while Naishtat's proposal has not yet even been scheduled for hearing.) After the Cap steps rally, the party will move back to Zilker for more live music, scheduled to run until 10pm.

In an unusual split, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on April 21 that police need to obtain a warrant before searching the vehicle of a person who has been arrested and locked in a police cruiser and thus poses no safety threat to officers. The court ruled that police may conduct a search incident to arrest without a warrant "only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest." In the case at issue (Ariz. v. Gant) police arrested Rodney Gant for driving with a suspended license. After Gant was handcuffed and put in the back of a locked cruiser, police searched his car and found a gun and a bag of cocaine in the pocket of a jacket left on the backseat. Gant challenged the search, arguing that because he was already secured, there was no reason for the warrantless search, and that there was no possibility police would find evidence related to the traffic offense for which he'd been arrested. (Asked at a pretrial hearing to explain the reason for the search, one officer told the court: "Because the law says we can do it.") An unusual majority of the court -- including Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, David Souter and Clarence Thomas joining John Paul Stevens' opinion -- agreed that the search was unconstitutional. "Neither the possibility of access nor the likelihood of discovering offense-related evidence authorized the search in this case," Stevens wrote.