I wrote about the Will Foster case in the Chronicle last week. Here's a brief summary: Foster had a small medical marijuana garden in Tulsa that was raided in 2005. Two years later, he was sentenced to an insane 93 YEARS in prison. Only after a publicity campaign in which DRCNet played a vital role was he resentenced to merely 20 years, and after being twice denied parole, he was paroled to California.

Although Oklahoma thought Foster should be on parole until 2011, California decided he didn't need any more state supervision and released him from parole after three years. That wasn't punitive enough for Oklahoma. Although Foster had left the Bible Belt state behind with no intention of ever returning, Oklahoma parole officials issued a parole violation warrant for his extradition to serve out the remainder of his sentence. When Foster had to show ID in a police encounter, the warrant popped up, and he was jailed. Desperate, Foster filed a writ of habeas corpus and won! A California judge ruled the warrant invalid, and Foster was a free man again.

But not for long. It's thirst for vengeance still unslaked, the state of Oklahoma issued yet another parole violation warrant for Foster's extradition because he refused to agree to an extension of his parole to 2015--four years past the original Oklahoma parole date. Then he got raided in California, thanks to bad information from an informant with an axe to grind. Foster had a legal medical marijuana grow, but it took a hard-headed Sonoma County prosecutor more than a year to drop charges, and Foster has been jailed the whole time.

Now that the charges have been dropped, Foster still isn't free because Oklahoma still wants him back. Extradition warrants have been signed by the governors of both states, and he was days away from being extradited in shackles when he filed a new habeas writ this week. Filing the writ will stop him from being sent back to Oklahoma, but it also means he's stuck in jail for the foreseeable future. The writ is a legal strategy; his real best hope is to get one of those governors to rescind the extradition order.

You can help. Click on this link to find out how to write the governors. I think a campaign of letters to the editor of Oklahoma papers might help, too. Those letters might ask why Oklahoma wants to continue to spend valuable tax dollars to persecute a harmless man whose only crime was to try to get some relief for his ailments--and who has no intention of ever returning there.

...So, anyway, I went to see Will at the Sonoma County Jail Saturday night. But I didn't get in. The steel-toes in my footwear set off the metal detector, and I quickly found out such apparel was a security risk. Who knew? I'll go back later this week. I guess I'll wear sandals.

In the meantime, there are letters waiting to be written. Keyboard commandos, saddle up!

Coca farmers, typically peasants in Colombia's most impoverished regions, have never been considered criminals, but that could change if President Álvaro Uribe has his way.

Late last week, both houses of the Mexican Congress approved a bill that would decriminalize the possession of

Derek Copp, the 20-year-old Grand Valley State University student who was shot in the chest during a March 11 drug raid on his Allendale, Michigan, apartment,

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Since a 1994 Colombian Supreme Court ruling that held criminalizing drug users violated their privacy and autonomy, drug possession has not been a crime in Colombia.

The number of African Americans behind bars for drug offenses dropped dramatically from 1999 to 2005, while the number of white drug war prisoners has increased, according to a report released Tues

An Ohio law criminalizing the possession of salvia divinorum went into effect Tuesday, but that didn't stop an over-eager Butler County sheriff's deputy from arresting a man for it Monday or Butler

The drug court phenomenon celebrates its 20th birthday this year.

Law enforcement officials justify the frequent use of heavily-armed SWAT teams and no-knock warrants -- police do about 50,000 SWAT raids per year -- as protecting officer safety.

Law enforcement likes to argue that it needs to resort to heavy-handed tactics such as SWAT-style raids and no-knock warrants because drug law enforcement is just so darned dangerous. You know the spiel: "We're outgunned and up against crazed drug dealers, so we need to come on like gangbusters for our own safety."

But I'm in the process of reviewing police deaths in the drug war since the beginning of 2008 for a Chronicle article that will appear Friday, and so far, I've only found two officers who were killed in drug raids during this time. I'm using the Officer Down Memorial Page and the National Law Enforcement Memorial data bases and I still have to dig a little deeper into the numbers and the discrepancies between the two, but so far, it doesn't appear that enforcing the nation's drug laws is that dangerous for police.

For civilians, it is perhaps a different story. Nobody's keeping a data base of citizens killed by the police, let alone those killed by police enforcing the drug laws, although I have a few ideas on where to come up with some figures, or at least some especially horrendous cases. I'll be looking into that, as well.

I'll be talking to as many cops, criminologists, and other interested parties as I can, but at this point, it seems that it is going to be hard to justify the overwhelming use of force typical of police drug raids. As much as they would like to think they are, cops are not US military Special Forces units, and drug law violators are not terrorist fugitives. Look for the story on Friday.

The jam band Phish played a three-night show at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia, over the weekend -- their first appearance anywhere in five years -- but it was just like old times as loc

More than 700 people died of drug overdoses in Washington state in 2006, up from a little over 400 in 1999. In an effort to blunt that trend, state Rep.

As if we needed further confirmation that the war on drugs is racially biased in outcome, the human rights group Human Rights Watch released a report Monday showing that blacks have been arrested n

Via DrugWarRant:

ERWIN, Tenn. -- A man was been arrested after police said he used counterfeit money to purchase fake OxyContin pills from an undercover officer.

Unicoi County Sheriff's deputies arrested a 21-year-old man on Tuesday and charged him with criminal conspiracy with schedule II drugs, forgery and criminal simulation. [Pantagraph.com]

It's almost funny, except the part where this poor bastard goes to jail for some drugs that never even existed.

Mixing equal parts genuine outrage and political calculation, major elements of the drug reform movement have begun a national boycott of cereal giant Kellogg over its treatment of Olympic gold med

Yesterday, we learned that eight people have been arrested in the aftermath of the Michael Phelps bong photo and the infamous bong itself has been captured and taken into custody. As new details emerge, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there really is a serious campaign underway to prosecute Michael Phelps:

The effort to prosecute Phelps on what would be at most a minor drug charge seem extreme compared to similar cases, lawyers said, and have led some to question whether the sheriff is being overzealous because he's dealing with a celebrity.
…
The investigators appear to be trying to build a case against Phelps from others — a tactic normally used to bring down drug dealers with a large amounts of cocaine or methamphetamine, not someone who smoked marijuana five months ago, said Chip Price, a Greenville attorney who has dealt with drug cases for 33 years. [AP]

There’s not much left to say about this that I haven’t said already, so I’ll say it again: Sheriff Leon Lott and his henchmen are unhinged drug war lunatics wielding their unchecked powers as arbitrarily and embarrassingly as humanly possible.

To my knowledge, next to no one on the planet supports this ridiculous crusade. So I can only hope that this very visible example of vindictive marijuana enforcement serves to focus public attention on the often pathetic behavior of our supposedly heroic drug war soldiers. Just look at them. Look at what they are doing. And remember that this episode is hardly the first or only time the drug warriors have allowed childish and obsessive pursuits to triumph over the public interest.

If they think destroying Michael Phelps is a good idea, imagine all the other wretched crap they’ve done that you don’t even know about.

Although marijuana use in Japan occurs at dram

Well, not in so many words.

Since at least the 15th Century, farmers in Morocco's Rif Mountains have been growing marijuana, which they typically process into hashish.