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The paper describes the current status and prospects of the war on drugs formulated and deployed by Colombia in Latin America. To this end, an analysis of official figures given in the last two decades by the United Nations and its agencies UNODC and INCB SIMCI. Similarly, discusses recent initiatives raised by the UNASUR and the Organization of American States (OAS), with a view to finding new ways and solutions to a multidimensional issue like this. We performed a descriptive and quantitative study using a transdisciplinary reading socio-legal phenomenon, taking into account the law and international relations, as this issue has a direct impact on the institutions of international society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to give a different perspective about the actual controlling drugs policies used around the world. After going through a brief tour on marihuana uses in humanity's history, we make a summary of some of the actual policies around the world. We center our attention in countries such as Sweden, Portugal, United States, Netherlands and Colombia. Then, with the context defined, we enter the main discussion: are the actual policies around the world and specifically in Colombia efficient on decreasing consumption or they are just a nonsense impossible to win war? With numbers and facts we'll expose the situation nowadays supporting the theory that suggests an alternative policy to face the global drug problem, in consumption as in production, instead of keep fighting a war declared decades ago and hasn't showed visible results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that Argentina Customs built capabilities to tackle drug trafficking from 2002 to 2008. The questions seek to answer are: Was effective the response from Customs?. What kinds of skills were developed? How do these skills work? Why were they effective? It built an impact measurement, to prove that Argentina's Customs was succesfull reducing cocaine traffic from Argentina to Europe. It is described the organizational changes that were made to cope with the problem, and then a description of a case where Customs stopped a big smuggling of cocaine hidden in shipments of coal. It shows how all of these organizational changes worked together to solve the problem. The case shows that successful capacity building is due to a "craftmanship" management approach, in contrast to the traditional of hard and soft hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre sobre las controversias alrededor de la legalización de marihuana. El autor comenta sobre la conferencia de la Asamblea General de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas sobre la legalidad y la regulación de las drogas. También se considera el estado actual de la denominada guerra contra las drogas.

The article discusses the effects of drug trafficking on Mexican politics and the changes that have been set forth by President Felipe Calderón in order to regain government control of the state. The author focuses on the history of drug trafficking in Mexico and the role of large cartels which have historically received protection from the top of the political class. The article concludes with a discussion on the militarization of Mexico by President Calderón in order to increase public security.