Drug War Chronicle

South Dakota will vote on a medical marijuana initiative on election day. It came within four points in 2006. Maybe this time, the state can wipe away the stigma of being the only one to defeat medical marijuana at the ballot box.

The battle of the Proposition 19 polls continues, with a new SurveyUSA poll showing it with a four point lead, but still under 50%. Now, every vote is going to count.

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

Crookedness in the Wayne County, Michigan, court system; endemic corruption in Camden; a tweaker cop in Iowa; and another pair of jail guards go bad.

The Prop 19 campaign is going down to the wire. A new Fox News poll has it losing by one point, but that's well within the statistical margin of error. It still leads by nearly four points in the average of all polls.

Some 48 law enforcement officers were murdered doing their job last year, according to the FBI. None of them died enforcing drug laws, despite how scary police like to make the drug war sound.

Progressive Insurance magnate Peter Lewis has opened his checkbook for Proposition 19, making the latest in a series of last-minute major donations to help get-out-the-vote efforts.

US Attorney General Eric Holder has, unsurprisingly, come out against California's Prop 19 marijuana legalization initiative. He said in a Wednesday letter to former DEA chief and at a press conference Friday in Los Angeles that the feds will continue to enforce federal pot laws no matter the election results.

A pro-Democratic "super-PAC" is accusing Republican Kentucky US Senate candidate Rand Paul of being soft on drugs. But it's not working so far.

A leading scholar of the history of American drug policy has died. David Musto's "The American Disease" broke new ground when published in 1973.