Muzzled Press

Monday's attack on the newspaper El Mañana in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico has its intended effect: The paper plans to scale back its coverage of murders in that border city.

The San Antonio Express-News says the Mexican daily, which already refrains from printing names of suspects, will move its stories on the killings from its front page to inside the paper.

"There is no point in investigating narcotrafficking," Ramon Cantu Deandar, the paper's editor, said Tuesday. "That's an international problem that not even the authorities have the will to fix."

The Dallas Morning News has eyewitness accounts from newsroom employees:

"The assailants walked into the lobby of the newspaper and yelled, 'You're all going to hell' and ... started shooting up the place," said Ramón Cantú Deandar, editor of El Mañana and an afternoon daily, La Tarde.

At the bottom of this story, the DMN also offers excerpts of El Mañana's front-page editorial calling the attack an act of terrorism -- and calling for legalizing some drugs "in order to exert control."

The newspaper is correct: The only way to destroy the power of the drug cartels is to take away their money. The only way to do that is to stop making the cost of drugs artificially high due to prohibition. Drug prohibition has failed.