Regarding the Dec. 27 front-page article "Mexico questions its drug strategy":

The United States has survived the violence of its war on drugs, but Mexico might not. This sad situation illustrates something that nearly everyone except the folks in the U.S. government has known since Prohibition turned our streets into battlegrounds: The second-order effects of criminalizing drugs cause more harm than the drugs themselves.

Gene Fellner, Derwood

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MELQUISEDET Angulo Cordova, a member of Mexico's naval special forces, had been laid to rest for only a few hours when hit men burst into his family's home Tuesday and slaughtered his mother, brother, sister and aunt.

This was not a random act of violence. It appears to have been retribution for Mr. Cordova's part last week in a military ambush that resulted in the death of Arturo Beltran Leyva, one of Mexico's most violent and brazen drug lords, and a handful of his bodyguards. The revenge killing, the targeting of a mother and family, has shocked even those who have been numbed by thousands of deaths at the hands of the nation's drug cartels during the past few years. This tragedy should serve as a reminder of why the United States must remain a strong and unwavering partner to Mexico in combating the increasingly ruthless cartels.

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Despite $1 million in city AIDS funding over three years, the District's largest needle-exchange program is nearly out of cash and has at times been unable to supply clean syringes to intravenous drug users.

The shortage comes after years of turmoil at Prevention Works, which offers needle exchanges at its Northeast Washington headquarters and from a mobile unit that sweeps the city's most drug-addled neighborhoods.

"I am distraught," said Philip Terry, executive director of Prevention Works. "I am not happy that we're in this circumstance."

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D.C. Council Chairman Ready to Begin Crafting Policy With Lifting of Ban

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) said Monday that he wants to move swiftly to establish regulations for distributing medical marijuana now that Congress has voted to lift restrictions on city drug policy.

Gray said the council will use Initiative 59, which voters overwhelmingly approved in 1998, to begin crafting a policy that allows doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients with serious illnesses.

"We've waited 10 years. . . . I think the opportunity to send it is now," Gray said. "There is no reason to sit on it."

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The U.S. Senate passed a bill Sunday that clears the way for the District government to allow medical marijuana use and to spend local tax dollars to help low-income women pay for abortions.

More than a decade ago, D.C. voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that would allow for the possession, use, cultivation and distribution of marijuana if recommended by a physician for serious illnesses.

Initiative 59 passed with 69 percent of the vote in 1998, but before it could take effect, Congress passed legislation banning the practice in the District.

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WASHINGTON -- Congress took an important step toward granting the nation's capital more control over its own affairs Thursday as the House voted to remove a measure that bars the city from using local tax money to help low-income women pay for abortions.

The legislation would also allow the city to legalize medical marijuana -- a move that was overwhelmingly approved by voters in a referendum in 1998 -- and to continue to finance needle-exchange programs.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat and the city's nonvoting member of the House, said the bill's passage represented a major breakthrough for home rule.

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Studying 11-Year-Old Initiative

D.C. officials Wednesday said they would proceed cautiously if Congress lifts a federal roadblock to implementing a voter initiative approved more than a decade ago that called for legalizing medical marijuana.

Congress is poised to pass an omnibus spending bill that will not include a rider known as the Barr Amendment, which has blocked the District from legalizing medical marijuana.

The Barr Amendment has banned the city from funding legalization efforts since 1998, when 69 percent of voters cast ballots approving the use of medical marijuana in the District.

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Armstrong Williams confuses the impact of drug-law enforcement with the effects of marijuana in his latest Op-Ed column ("California doping our youths," Nation, Monday).

Record numbers of citizens arrested for marijuana possession have been forced into treatment by the criminal justice system. Drug warriors distort treatment statistics to claim that marijuana is "addictive." The George W. Bush administration employed this ruse, and President Obama's Office of National Drug Control Policy is perpetuating it. So much for change.

Zero-tolerance drug laws do not distinguish between occasional use and chronic abuse. The coercion of Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis into taxpayer-funded treatment centers says a lot about the government's priorities but nothing about the relative harms of marijuana.

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I was horrified to read recently that it is increasingly common in California to treat children diagnosed with Attention - Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) with marijuana. California voters passed a law allowing doctors to recommend medical marijuana to their patients, including those under the age of 18. The law allows doctors to recommend marijuana "for any ... illness for which marijuana provides relief." Under that broad umbrella, doctors are pushing pot to treat all kinds of maladies, including ADHD.

Truly, this is horrifying. ADHD is described as a neurological disorder that prevents children from focusing on a specific task. In essence, people with ADHD have difficulty with self-regulation and self-motivation, owing to problems with distractibility, organization and prioritization.

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George F. Will is right ["Rocky Mountain high," op-ed, Nov. 29]: The medical marijuana movement is partly a fiction, a stand-in for legalization. This is not to say that marijuana does not relieve a wide range of ailments. It does. But if Mr. Will and Colorado Attorney General John Suthers believe that medical marijuana will cause people to lose faith in the legal system and "care less as law itself loses its dignity," they are living in their own fictional world.

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DENVER - Inside the green neon sign, which is shaped like a marijuana leaf, is a red cross. The cross serves the fiction that most transactions in the store -- which is what it really is -- involve medicine.

The Justice Department recently announced that federal laws against marijuana would not be enforced for possession of marijuana that conforms to states' laws. In 2000, Colorado legalized medical marijuana. Since Justice's decision, the average age of the 400 persons a day seeking "prescriptions" at Colorado's multiplying medical marijuana dispensaries has fallen precipitously. Many new customers are college students.

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Prisons Should Abolish Long-Term Solitary Confinement.

MANY ARE KEPT in their cells for at least 23 hours a day with minimal contact with other people, including guards. Food is delivered through a slit in the door, and most are prohibited from attending classes or counseling sessions with other inmates.

They are not, by and large, the "worst of the worst" -- mass murderers or psychopaths in the mold of Hannibal Lecter. They are, instead, men and women serving time for all manner of offenses, some of them relatively minor. But they have been deemed disciplinary problems -- or potential disciplinary problems -- by prison staffers. And so they find themselves locked up in what is commonly known as solitary confinement, sometimes for months, sometimes for years and sometimes with devastating consequences.

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Group Also Wants Overhaul Of Mexican Border Agencies

A binational task force on U.S.-Mexico border issues will call Friday on the Obama administration and Congress to reinstate an expired ban on assault weapons and for Mexico to overhaul its frontier police and customs agencies to mirror the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The recommendations are among a broad set of security, trade, development and environmental proposals that come as President Obama and his Mexicans counterpart, Felipe Calderon, move to deepen engagement on issues including economic recovery, climate change, illegal immigration and narcotics trafficking.

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Congress Is Set to Stick It to Clean-Syringe Programs

PROGRAMS THAT allow drug addicts to swap their dirty needles for sterile syringes are effective in reducing the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. A 2008 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that an 80 percent reduction in the incidence of HIV in intravenous drug users over the past 20 years can be attributed in part to such programs funded by private organizations and localities. But Congress appears intent on gumming up the works.

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Kudos to President Obama for following through on his campaign promise to stop harassing medical marijuana patients and their caregivers who abide by their states' marijuana laws ["U.S. eases stance on medical marijuana," front page, Oct. 20]. The Bush and Clinton administrations' war on sick patients was the most outrageous aspect of our nation's costly and ineffective marijuana policies.

While allowing sick patients to have access to their medicine is a no-brainer -- supported by more than 70 percent of Americans -- it is also time for us to have a serious debate on the merits of marijuana prohibition in general.

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Has the Justice Department Taken a First Step Toward Decriminalization of Marijuana?

THE JUSTICE Department announced last week that it would not prosecute patients who legally obtain marijuana from licensed dispensaries in the 13 states that allow medicinal use. The decision is both sensible and potentially problematic.

People suffering from HIV/AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis and other serious ailments should not be harassed or live in fear if they abide by the laws of their state to obtain a drug that may provide relief from such symptoms as pain and nausea. Neither should those who strictly follow legal standards in dispensing marijuana from state-licensed shops. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is right to focus federal resources primarily on large-scale illegal traffickers.

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When an indoor public smoking ban took effect in the Netherlands in the summer of 2008, the worry wasn't so much for the one-third of Dutch adults who smoke cigarettes. Bars and restaurants went smoke-free without much problem.

A more intriguing concern was for the effect on the uniquely Dutch institution of marijuana-selling "coffee shops." If a place calls itself a coffee shop, that means three things: One, there is marijuana and hash for sale; two, for the price of a coffee, you may sit and smoke your own; and three, you will not be arrested.

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Activists Dig into Symbolism in Effort to Legalize Hemp

You want to dig a garden, you need a shovel. You want to dig a guerrilla garden of illegal hemp on the front lawn of Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters and get arrested for the cameras, you need a symbol.

Shortly before they all were happily handcuffed Tuesday, the farmers took one look at what the activists had brought to dig with, and just shook their heads.

The symbolic shovels were shiny, chrome-plated affairs, the kind for turning the earth in a Washington photo op, stamped with slogans: "Reefer Madness Will Be Buried." When the shovel blades were experimentally pressed into the mulch outside the group's hotel, they bent like toys.

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Thanks for publishing an account of the economic impact of domestic marijuana production on Mexican cartels' profits ["Cartels Face an Economic Battle," front page, Oct. 7].

It's disingenuous for Ralph Reyes, the Drug Enforcement Administration's chief of operations for Mexico and Central America, to blame casual marijuana smokers in the United States for the violence in Mexico. Given the opportunity, marijuana smokers would gladly buy American pot. As The Post's story pointed out, that's increasingly what they are doing.

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STEPPING UP FOR CLINIC BY RAISING $800,000

With many District residents stunned by recent findings that the city's HIV/AIDS infection rate is at epidemic levels, the 23rd annual AIDS Walk Washington attracted the highest turnout in several years, organizers said Saturday.

More than 7,000 participants, ranging from 20-somethings in ball gowns and other festive costumes to senior citizens in T-shirts, strolled or ran the 5-kilometer route along Pennsylvania Avenue NW in the morning, raising nearly $800,000 to benefit the nonprofit Whitman-Walker Clinic and its HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs.

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