For a whole year now, the new administration has been proudly insisting over and over again that they're taking drug policy in a new direction, abandoning the "drug war" approach and prioritizing treatment instead of more arrests and incarceration. Apparently, someone forgot they'd have to release a budget for all this, which would kinda blatantly expose the illusion that anything's changed:

Anyone can just plainly see the two towers of "Domestic Law Enforcement" and "Interdiction," that together dwarf the resources to be spent on treatment. What the drug czar's office is calling a "Balanced Approach to Drug Control" is so obscenely imbalanced that anybody who knows how to read a bar graph could see it without having to put their contacts in.

We're still spending twice as much on the war as we are on treatment for the actual people our drug policy is supposed to help. The urge to describe this as "balanced" is just the trademark dishonesty we've come to expect from the drug czar's office anytime they're required to sum up their agenda in one sentence.

The whole situation is even more appalling when you consider the phenomenal lengths this administration has taken to convince everyone that their drug policy priorities aren't like this. I suppose it's a measure of success for our movement that we've at least made it unacceptably controversial for the White House to take any pride in its drug war spending, but that's still an early stage in the long battle to take interdiction off the table and leave enforcement to the states.

If Obama hopes to placate the public's growing disgust with the drug war status quo, he'll have to pay much more than lip service to the reform of our drug policy. Everything people hate about the war on drugs must be changed; the swelling prison population, the persecution of the sick, the subsidization of widespread violence, the vast corruption and the perpetual recycling of so many ridiculous lies all must come to an end or else the people refusing to end it will be blamed hard for the damage it keeps causing.

The public relations holiday that followed Obama's improved policy on medical marijuana is officially over and the reluctant support he enjoyed from so many reformers in 2008 will be hard to come by if the drug war is uglier in 2012 than it is today.

The Obama administration announced this week that it is nominating acting

After stalling for a whole year, the White House has finally announced Obama's choice to head the DEA. And there isn’t anything good to be said about it:

For those hoping that Barack Obama would wage the war on drugs less aggressively than his predecessor, this is not a good sign: Yesterday he announced that the new head of the Drug Enforcement Administration will be Michele Leonhart, a career DEA agent who has been the agency's deputy administrator since March 2004 and its acting administrator since November 2007. [Reason]

For all the recent rhetoric about changing the focus of our drug policy and moving beyond the war mentality that's gripped this issue for decades, the White House now plans to promote a Bush Administration holdover who couldn’t more perfectly embody the ugly history we're all working so hard to put behind us.

It was Leonhart who gave marching orders in the federal war on medical marijuana, right up to and even after the Obama Administration pledged to respect state laws. She celebrated the inauguration with a cleverly-timed, though transparently dishonest move to continue blocking medical marijuana research despite the ruling of a DEA administrative law judge. She's been closely tied to the sketchiest career informant in DEA history, even making light of his reputation for perjury. And she even managed to get her name in the press by wasting $123,000 in taxpayer money on a private flight to Colombia, even though the DEA owns 106 airplanes.

Leonhart's nomination is an affront to the Obama Administration's promises of a more enlightened drug policy approach. It's also a clear statement that they don't think we're paying attention to the faces behind the drug war's rich and recent history of arrogance, ignorance and injustice. Let's prove them wrong by opposing this embarrassing nomination as loudly as we can.

Please contact the White House today to tell them that Michele Leonhart's DEA career has already gone on far too long.

In 2006, voters in South Dakota become the first -- and the only -- in the nation to reject a state initiative legalizing medical marijuana, defeating it by a margin of 52% to 48%.

The Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday approved Sen. Jim Webb's (D-VA) National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 on a unanimous voice vote Thursday.

Bolivian President Evo Morales said Saturday he wants to legalize the small holdings farme

The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals in St.

The US counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan, a key element in Western efforts to defeat the Taliban, is short on long-term strategy, clear objectives, and a plan to hand over responsibility to A

As 2009 prepares to become history, we look back at the past year's domestic drug policy developments.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police officers must obtain a search warrant before reviewing the contents of a suspect's cell phone unless their safety is in danger.

(Please read our top ten US domestic drug policy stories review too!)

Two leading advocates of marijuana legalization at the statehouse came out swinging during a Thursday press conference to push the issue forward.

Eleven years after District of Columbia voters approved a medical marijuana initiative with 69% of the vote, Congress has finally stepped aside and will allow DC to implement the will of the people

Our friends at MPP just caught the drug czar literally editing out the most important part of the American Medical Association's new position on medical marijuana. According to a new ONDCP "factsheet":

The American Medical Association: "To help facilitate scientific research and the development of cannabionoid-based medicines, the AMA adopted (a) new policy … This should not be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product."

Notice how it doesn't say what the "new policy…" actually is? That's because the original quote says, "the AMA adopted new policy urging the federal government to review marijuana’s status as a Schedule I substance." Leaving that part out isn't just confusing and dishonest; it looks ridiculous.

If it's now ok to use ellipses to pervert policy positions, maybe I'll just take AMA's statement and do this with it:

"This should…be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, [and] that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product."

Yeah, I like the sound of that. But I'm not going to print it on a "factsheet," because it's not true.

As accustomed as I am to seeing the drug czar's office routinely deploying these sorts of sleazy semantic deceptions, I'm genuinely awed by this one. They buried the lead so blatantly that anyone who reads it ought to just end up wondering what the hell AMA's "new policy" on medical marijuana actually is. And once Google answers that question in a half-second, you might as well have just told the truth or scrubbed AMA off the site altogether like I suggested weeks ago.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police officers must obtain a search warrant before reviewing the contents of a suspect’s cell phone unless their safety is in danger. The ruling came on a narrow 5-4 vote of the justices.

The ruling came in State v. Smith, in which Antwaun Smith was arrested on drug charges after answering a cell phone call from a crack cocaine user acting as a police informant. When Smith was arrested, officers took his cell phone and searched it without his consent or a search warrant. Smith was charged with cocaine possession, cocaine trafficking, tampering with evidence and two counts of possession of criminal tools.

At trial, Smith argued that evidence derived through the cell phone search should be thrown out because the search violated the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the trial judge, citing a 2007 federal court ruling that found a cell phone is similar to a closed container found on a defendant and thus subject to warrantless search, admitted the evidence. Smith was subsequently convicted on all charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Smith appealed, but lost on a 2-1 vote in the appeals court. In that decision, the dissenting judge cited a different federal court case that found that a cell phone is not a container.

In the majority opinion Tuesday, state Supreme Court Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger wrote that the court did not agree with the appeals court and trial judge that a cell phone was a closed container. "We do not agree with this comparison, which ignores the unique nature of cell phones," Lanzinger wrote. "Objects falling under the banner of 'closed container' have traditionally been physical objects capable of holding other physical objects. ... Even the more basic models of modern cell phones are capable of storing a wealth of digitized information wholly unlike any physical object found within a closed container."

"People keep their e-mail, text messages, personal and work schedules, pictures, and so much more on their cell phones," Craig Jaquith, Smith's attorney, said in a statement. "I can't imagine that any cell phone user in Ohio would want the police to have access to that sort of personal information without a warrant. Today, the Ohio Supreme Court properly brought the Fourth Amendment into the 21st century."

But Greene County prosecutor Stephen Haller complained to the Associated Press that the high court had gone too far. "I'm disappointed with this razor-thin decision," Haller said. "The majority here has announced this broad, sweeping new Fourth Amendment rule that basically is at odds with decisions of other courts."