Political Scene: Drugs at Home and Abroad: The New Yorker On this week's Political Scene podcast, Mattathias Schwartz and Patrick Radden Keefe join Curtis Fox, who is filling in for Dorothy Wickenden, to discuss American drug policy at home and abroad. Keefe says that the movement to legalize marijuana for recreational use, which has already been successful in Colorado and Washington State, is "driven by a dawning realization that the prohibition of the drug simply hasn't worked, and that there have been huge negative consequences." Decriminalization, he says, is "complicated, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea." Schwartz, who wrote about a botched drug raid in Honduras in this week's issue of the magazine, says that the liberalization of drug laws within the United States has not had a corresponding effect on the government's efforts abroad: "The regime is very much as it was ten or twenty years ago." This stasis, he says, is the result of bureaucratic inertia, and of political incentives: "The drug war works on the stump, whether or not it works in the field." For more, read Keefe's recent article on the effort to create a legal marijuana economy in Washington State. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or XML, and become a fan of the Political Scene on Facebook. Photograph by Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post/Getty.