Drug War Chronicle

Washington state's move toward legal, regulated marijuana commerce is well underway. Initial draft rules have been circulated and commented on, and here's where things stand now. But retail outlets are still months away.

California dispensaries continue their vanishing act, thanks to feds and local officials, but Arizona fends off a challenge, Oregon adds PTSD to its list of approved conditions, and frustrated New Jersey patients rally.

A pill-popping Florida cop goes to jail, a coke-slinging New York TSA agent gets busted, and a North Carolina narc gets fired.

A trio of leading scientists, including British Professor David Nutt, have lambasted the prohibitions on psychoactive substances as amounting to censorship of science in a paper published Wednesday.

In New Jersey, the Senate Judiciary Committee is where marijuana decriminalization bills get stalled. A new poll may help prod legislators to move on them.

A Maine marijuana legalization bill morphed into a bill to allow a popular vote on legalization, but even that couldn't pass the House. If solons don't act, activists are looking at a citizen initiative in 2016.

France has taken a major step toward okaying marijuana-based medicines.

Clarence Walker presents a Southern gothic tale of lust, judicial privilege, retaliation, planted drugs, and crooked cops.

Canadian "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery has been sent to solitary in a US federal prison over what looks like a bogus "investigation" into who (or what) took photos of he and prison bandmates practicing.

A US district court judge has lambasted federal meth sentencing guidelines as harsh, unfair, based on politics instead of science, and "fundamentally flawed." He's not the only one.