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In an interview with the Huffington Post, Webb said that everything should be considered. And he means everything.

"I think everything should be on the table, and we specifically say that we want recommendations on how to deal with drug policy in our country. And we'll get it to the people who have the credibility and the expertise and see what they come up with," said Webb.

What about legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana?

Webb paused. "I think they should do a very careful examination of all aspects of drug policy. I've done a couple of very extensive hearings on this, so we'll wait to see what they say about that," he said.

SUMMARY

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, introduced by
Senator Jim Webb on
March 26, 2009, will create a blue-ribbon commission charged with
undertaking an 18-month, top-
to-bottom review of our entire criminal justice system. Its task
will be to propose concrete, wide- Read more »

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.

Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous.

We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

We need to fix the system.

Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration. Twenty-five years ago, I went to Japan on assignment for PARADE to write a story on that country's prison system. Read more »

New York Times:

REYNOSA, Mexico - An army convoy on the hunt for traffickers rolled out of its base recently in this border town under the control of the Gulf Cartel - and an ominous voice crackled over a two-way radio frequency to announce just that. The voice, belonging to a cartel spy, then broadcast the soldiers' route through the city, turn by turn, using the same military language as the soldiers.

"They're following us," Col. Juan Jose Gomez, who was monitoring the transmission from the front seat of an olive-green pickup truck, said with a shrug.

The presence of the informers, some of them former soldiers, highlights a central paradox in Mexico's ambitious and bloody assault on the drug cartels that have ravaged the country. The nation has begun a war, but it cannot fully rely on the very institutions - the police, customs, the courts, the prisons, even the relatively clean army - most needed to carry it out. Read more »

by Jeremy D. Mayer, Politico

Smoking pot doesn’t cause schizophrenia, but marijuana as an issue sure gives our political system the symptoms. We have just elected our third president in a row who at least tried marijuana in early adulthood, yet it remains illegal.

As we discovered again this week, President Obama, like his two predecessors, supports imprisoning people for making the same choices he made.

Beyond imprisonment, one of my policy students, who was honest on a security clearance about her one time use of pot, could lose her job for doing what Clinton, Bush and Obama did. Read more »