Drug War Chronicle #707 - November 3, 2011

The first hundreds of what could be more than 12,000 federal crack offenders to win retroactive sentence reductions began walking out of federal prisons Tuesday, but there is much more work to do.

The fight to stop the drug war has entered its possibly most critical time to date, a time of major challenges but also unprecedented opportunities. We need your help today to decide whether StoptheDrugWar.org can enter this moment at full strength.

That federal offensive against medical marijuana distribution in California is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, including a growing number of elected officials.

Can you guess the drug czar's official response to those White House marijuana legalization petitions? We thought you could. But did the White House guess that marijuana legalization would be their most popular petition topic?

Fewer drug arrests mean more violent crime, right? Wrong, at least in San Francisco.

A proposal to decriminalize the possession of up to 10 grams of pot is headed before the Chicago city council next week.

Mexican drug trafficking organizations make billions each year smuggling drugs into the United States, profiting enormously from the prohibitionist drug policies of the US government. Since Mexican president Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and called the armed forces into the fight against the so-called cartels, prohibition-related violence has killed around 40,000 people, including more than 15,000 last year.

An investigation into a dope-slinging Brooklyn cop has opened a window on a wider culture of corruption in the NYPD, plus your typical handful of corrupt cop cases.

A trucker carrying a load of weed north through Texas apparently shot himself rather than face arrest after being pulled over with more than 600 pounds. That's drug war fatality number 42 for the year.

Events and quotes of note from this week's drug policy events of years past.