The brutal murder of retired Mexican army Gen. Mauro Tello in Cancun earlier this month was a stark reminder of the wave of drug-related violence that is tormenting Mexico and that threatens to spill over into the United States.

The escalating violence unleashed by Mexico's drug cartels as they struggle to control trafficking routes and expand their illegal business left 5,700 dead in 2008, with homicide rates spiraling out of control in cities along the U.S. border.

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On Monday, after Richland County, S.C., Sheriff Leon Lott announced that he did not have enough evidence to arrest Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps for smoking marijuana at a November party in Columbia, the gold medalist issued a statement of regret. "I used bad judgment, and it's a mistake I won't make again," Mr. Phelps said. "For young people especially - be careful about the decisions you make. One bad decision can really hurt you and the people you care about."

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BOSTON -- Mexico is not a failing state, as it has become fashionable to say. What has failed is our "war on drugs." That failure and the drug-related violence wracking Mexico suggest it is time to open a national discussion on legalizing drugs.

About 6,600 Mexicans were killed in fighting involving drug gangs last year, and alarms are going off in this country. The U.S. Joint Forces Command, former drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey, former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and any number of analysts have speculated that Mexico is crumbling under pressure from drug gangs.

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In the story of the emperor with no clothes, it took someone whose observations are rarely heeded - a child - to point out the obvious fact no one else could acknowledge. In the case of drug policy, it takes people who are usually ignored by Washington policymakers - Latin Americans - to perform the same invaluable service.

Last week, a commission made up of 17 members, from Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to Sonia Picado, the Costa Rican who heads the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights, did nothing but admit the truth: The war on drugs is a failure.

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Drink and drive and it's grrrrrrrr-eat! Smoke pot and your flakes are frosted, dude. So seems the message from Kellogg's, which has decided not to renew its sponsorship contract with Michael Phelps after the Olympian was photographed smoking marijuana at a party in South Carolina.

That's showbiz, of course, but the cereal and munchie company had no problem signing Phelps despite an alcohol-related arrest. In 2004, Phelps was fined and sentenced to 18 months probation and community service after pleading guilty to driving while impaired. The silliness of our laws -- and the hypocrisy of our selective attitudes toward mood enhancers -- needs no further elaboration. Even so, things are getting sillier by the minute.

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Sometimes a writer goes searching for one story and finds something quite different, maybe even more important. You can, as I did, stumble upon ordinary people -- like swimming coaches Jenny Baldowski; her sons, Neal and Phillip, of the Augusta Riptides; and Philadelphia swim coach Jim Ellis of the "Pride" biopic -- who are accomplishing gold-medal feats despite limited resources and the negative forces and images working against their efforts with disadvantaged athletes. How do these community coaches handle the fallout when a high-profile athlete, such as Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, messes up with even a "dumb mistake," as Mr. Ellis said, after all the hurdles these mentors jump, at considerable personal cost, to keep their young athletes involved in sports and swimming a straight and narrow path?

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It's hell being a celebrity, especially if you're young and find yourself at a party, where marijuana and cameras should never mix.

And it's not exactly heaven being sheriff of a county with escalating drug crimes and pressure to treat all offenders equally.

Thus it is that Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps and Sheriff Leon Lott of South Carolina's Richland County are being forced to treat seriously a crime that shouldn't be one.

As everyone knows by now, Phelps was photographed smoking from an Olympic-sized bong during a University of South Carolina party last November. As all fallen heroes must -- by writ of the Pitchforks & Contrition Act -- Phelps has apologized for behavior that was "regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment," and has promised never to be a lesser role model again.

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So Michael Phelps dove headfirst into the bong water. Is anyone really surprised, after all those laps? There has always been something submerged and escapist about the world's greatest swimmer. When presented with a chamber containing a hazy translucent liquid, he did what's become second nature to him. He buried his face in it.

I'm just sorry I wasn't at that University of South Carolina house party to witness Squid Boy's binge firsthand -- not that I would ever make such a staggering misstep myself.

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Why Mexico's President Is Counting on Barack Obama

AS HE TOOK office eight years ago, George W. Bush promised to make relations with Latin America a priority.

The president's first foreign trip was to the ranch of Mexican President Vicente Fox, where Mr. Bush expansively promised "to boldly seize the unprecedented opportunity before us." There was no compelling reason for this hemispheric focus, other than the fact that Mr. Bush had been governor of Texas and was more familiar with Latin America than other parts of the world.

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At the start of the Afghan war, the British government implored the Bush administration to bomb Afghanistan's heroin labs and opium storehouses. The United States refused. America's Afghan partners in the struggle against the Taliban were involved in the drug trade. They were crooked, but useful.

In 2004, Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared a "jihad on the cultivation of drugs." Europeans guffawed. European intelligence had already named both the head of the Afghan Central Bank and Mr. Karzai's "anti-corruption czar" as "drug lords." And Mr. Karzai's youngest brother, Ahmed Wali, was named as a trafficker in early 2005 in U.S. intelligence documents discovered by CBS' "60 Minutes." In fact, there has never been a "drug lord" arrested in post September 11th Afghanistan. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in 2005 found more than nine tons of opium in the office of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province. Under British pressure, Mr. Akhundzada was removed, but the next year, Mr. Karzai found a place for him in the Afghan Senate.

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Regarding the chilling Dec. 4 front-page article "Mexico Drug Cartels Send a Message of Chaos, Death":

This mayhem occurs as a direct result of -- and not despite -- increased enforcement of senseless policies that make drugs illegal.

As a 32-year police officer in Maryland, I have seen how the prohibition of drugs empowers violent criminal thugs who sell them in our cities and outside our borders.

If we legalized and regulated drugs, people would buy them from legitimate sources instead of from illegal ones. But until that happens, criminals will do anything to protect their profits, including murdering rival traffickers, police officers, journalists and children.

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WASHINGTON - Sen. Kent Conrad Saturday welcomed the arrival of the first unmanned aerial vehicle to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Grand Forks Air Branch. The arrival of the Predator B is the culmination of a four-year effort by Sen. Conrad (D-N.D.) and the congressional delegation to shore up security along the nation's northern border.

"It is vital to America's security that we protect our borders, particularly the northern border," Senator Conrad said. "The Grand Forks Air Branch plays an essential role in helping shut the door on terrorists who want to sneak across remote border points to strike on U.S. soil."

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The mother of a quadriplegic inmate who died in 2004 after suffering breathing problems at the D.C. jail has reached financial settlements with the District government and his care providers, her attorneys disclosed yesterday.

The settlements were reached in the controversial death of Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year-old Maryland man who was paralyzed from the neck down and used a mouth-operated wheelchair.

Magbie died four days into a 10-day jail sentence for possessing marijuana, which he said he used to ease the discomfort caused by his disability. The jail infirmary, where he was housed for several days, wasn't equipped with the ventilator he needed to breathe at night.

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The Key Is Cutting Demand, Not Supply

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, commissioned by Sen. Joe Biden, has come to an unsurprising conclusion: After more than $6 billion spent, the controversial drug control operation known as Plan Colombia has failed by large margins to meet its targets.

The goal had been to cut cocaine production in Colombia by 50 percent from 2000 to 2006 through eradication of coca crops and training of anti-narcotics police and military personnel. In fact, cocaine production in Colombia rose 4 percent during that period, the GAO found. With increases in Peru and Bolivia, production of cocaine in South America increased by 12 percent during that period. In 1999 it cost $142 to buy a gram of cocaine on the street in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted figures from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. By 2006 the price had fallen to $94 per gram. ad_icon

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House Panel Finds Federal Appointees Attended Many Events on Taxpayers' Dime

When Karl Rove's office requested special help for beleaguered Republican congressional candidates in the months before the 2006 elections, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy jumped to the task. Director John Walters was called a "superstar" by a Rove aide after carrying half-million-dollar grants to news conferences with two congressmen and a senator.

Walters's visits to Utah, Missouri and Nevada were among at least 303 out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year, in a White House campaign that House Democratic investigators yesterday called unprecedented in scope and scale.

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The Sept. 12 front-page story "A Tangled Story of Addiction," about Cindy McCain's victory over her dependence on prescription painkillers, was "tangled" because it left out important facts that would have helped readers make a fair judgment about her behavior 16 years ago and gave a negative impression of a courageous struggle.

The Post failed to report or make clear that:

. She voluntarily cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration and, after she conquered the addiction, obtained additional help at her own expense. Her conduct in doing so persuaded the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix to agree to diversion to a treatment program without criminal charges.

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The Government's Battle Against Drug Gangs Is Deadlier Than Most Americans Realize.

MANY PEOPLE in Washington are rightly alarmed about the rising toll of military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan. They might be surprised to learn that a roughly equal number of people have been killed so far this year in a war raging much closer to home -- in Mexico. More Mexican soldiers and police officers have died fighting the country's drug gangs in the past two years than the number of U.S. and NATO troops killed battling the Taliban. Civilian casualties have been just as numerous, and as gruesome: There have been scores of beheadings, massacres of entire families and assassinations of senior officials. By the official count, kidnappings in Mexico now average 65 a month, ranking it well ahead of Afghanistan and Iraq.

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HIV infections among Latinos and African Americans in the United States are increasing at a dangerous rate. Hispanics represented about 22 percent of new HIV and AIDS cases diagnosed in 2006 -- though they were only about 14 percent of the overall population. In addition, there are fewer HIV-positive people in seven of the 15 target countries of the Global AIDS Initiative than there are HIV-positive African Americans here at home.

Locally, the situation is even more dire: A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that Hispanics in the District have the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country.

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The last time the House debated medical marijuana, David Krahl trod the halls of Capitol Hill lobbying against the legislation as deputy director of the Drug Free America Foundation.

Now, he's ready to lobby for allowing medicinal use of marijuana, and do anything he can to support it.

So far, no one has asked him for help, but in a recent letter to medical marijuana bill sponsor Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), he proclaimed that he'd reversed his position on whether cannabis can be a medicine.

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Before I retired as a police officer, I participated in drug raids in which I momentarily pointed my gun at 9-year-olds as well as dogs. The death of the Berwyn Heights mayor's dogs [Metro, July 31], the loss of a missionary shot down over Colombia in 2001, innocent pedestrians killed when drug dealers open up on each other -- these tragedies are simply the collateral damage that is necessary for Maryland to remain drug-free.

As much as Prince George's County Sheriff Michael Jackson should be embarrassed ["Shoot First, Ask Later," editorial, Aug. 7], so should The Post, since it supports the current drug control strategy of prohibition. This strategy caused the death of the two dogs, not marijuana. And oh, we are drug-free in Maryland, aren't we?

Howard J. Wooldridge 54

Frederick

The writer is an education specialist with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which favors the legalization and regulation of all drugs.

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