War on drugs is over, right?

That is what President Obama and White House drug czar (Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy) Gil Kerlikowske have said.

But today in Yahoo News, there is this story about an amazing pot bust in Chicago. So clearly, the war is over now, right?

CHICAGO (AP) — In Chicago, a bustling urban metropolis where skyscrapers are as likely to sprout up as anything a farmer might plant, someone decided there was just enough room to grow something a little more organic: Marijuana.

The plants grew even taller than the tallest Chicago Bulls. However, just days before the crop on a chunk of land the size of two football fields would have been ready to harvest, a police officer and county sheriff's deputy in a helicopter spotted it as they headed back to their hangar about three miles away.

On Wednesday, a day after the discovery of the largest marijuana farm anyone at the police department can remember, officers became farmers for a day as they began to chop down about 1,500 marijuana plants that police said could have earned the growers as much as $10 million.

No arrests had been made as of Wednesday, and police were still trying to determine who owns the property that housed the grow site on the city's far South Side. But police said they were hopeful that because of the size of the operation, informants or others might provide tips about those involved, including a man seen running from the area as the helicopter swooped low.

James O'Grady, the commander of the department's narcotics division, said they've never seen anything like it before, in part because Chicago's harsh winters mean growers have a lot less time to plant, grow and harvest marijuana than their counterparts in less inclement places such as California and Mexico. The bumper crop was likely planted in spring, O'Grady said.

Add to that the urban sprawl: there are few spots in Chicago where such an operation could go unnoticed because of all the buildings, roads and residents. The growers took pains to ensure their crop was largely hidden by a canopy of trees and surrounding vegetation.

"Somebody put a lot of thought into it," O'Grady said. "But they probably didn't anticipate the helicopter."

Chicago Police Officer Stan Kuprianczyk, a pilot, said police helicopters flew "over it all the time," to and from their hangar, without spying the grow site. Yet somehow, a number of factors came together to allow Cook County Sheriff's Deputy Edward Graney to spot the plants.

"We had the right altitude, the right angle, the right sunlight, and I happened to be glancing down," said Graney. He said he initially spotted five plants or so through the trees before he asked Kuprianczyk to circle around for a closer look.

"We just happened to be right over a small hole in the trees and we looked down," Kuprianczyk said.

They also happened to have the right training, Graney said, explaining that just a few weeks earlier a much smaller operation in suburban Chicago prompted them to fly over and videotape the scene so they might be able to recognize marijuana if they ever saw it from the air again.

So, by the time Graney spotted the marijuana plants, which are a much brighter shade of green than the surrounding vegetation, he had a pretty good idea what he was looking at.

Superintendent Garry McCarthy, whose officers are more used to intercepting shipments of marijuana grown elsewhere or discovering hydroponic growing operations inside buildings, said the discovery of the marijuana is significant in a larger fight against street violence.

Those involved with narcotics, whether it is marijuana, heroin or cocaine, purchase firearms with their profits and have shown they're willing to use them to protect their business, he said.

"That's where the violence comes in, the competition for the markets," he said.

[Related: Colorado's pro-pot initiative could threaten medical marijuana paradise]

NPR story on murder in Chicago

This morning on the way to work I heard a story by NPR on murder in Chicago.

According to their new mayor, "only 8.5%" of the entire city accounts for all of the murders and that's "pretty good" (although not so good for those living in those neighborhoods, as he mentioned).

Yes, it's a fact that murder is highly concentrated in America's cities. It tens to cluster in the poorest and most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Anyone whose ever studied criminology and learned about the "Chicago School" and social disorganization theory knows very well why this happens. And anyone whose ever been to Chicago knows exactly what these place looks like, sort of like the image above but worse.

Driving into Chicago to see the part of city where Oprah works -- the Loop (see the image on the right) -- you first encounter places that look like third-world countries, with boarded up buildings, graffiti, broken down cars, unbelievable population density (people literally living on top of each other), immense poverty, and almost no green space. These places have high rates of unemployment, few opportunities for legitimate success, failing schools, lots of gangs and illicit drug activity, and widespread hopelessness.

These are the conditions the produce murder in Chicago and the United States.

According to the NPR article: In Chicago, nearly 700 children were hit by gunfire last year — an average of almost two a day — and 66 of them died.

So to some degree it makes sense that the city is investing its resources into schools to help kids. Yet, not a single child was murdered at school. Every child murdered in Chicago died in one of those neighborhoods described above, sometimes on his or her way to or from school, but never at school.

Thus, the city's approach is flawed. They are practicing secondary crime prevention, aimed at the kids most prone to be murdered and to become murderers. While this is more promising than waiting until a murder occurs and then trying to deal with the aftermath (which is called tertiary crime prevention, or more accurately, crime control), and even more effective approach would be to address the conditions that actually produce murder.

This is called primary crime prevention, and entails eliminating the conditions that produce murder in all neighborhoods so that murder is far less likely to happen in the first place. In a nutshell, primary crime prevention amounts to bettering people's lives by increasing opportunities for legitimate work and happiness, by making sure that no one in the wealthiest nation on Earth lives in entrenched poverty and hopelessness.

I know I know, this is too "liberal" for some people and amounts to "socialism" for others. Keep in mind that the richest 400 people in the nation have more than half the money in the country. Those folks could easily do with slightly less (and still be filthy rich) in order to restore our nation's greatest cities, which would better everyone's lives and greatly reduce the number of murders in the nation on top of that.

So that we never have to see a horrendous image like this one.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/21/132678405/chicagos-schools-police-work-to-stem-violence