Drug War Chronicle

"New Study: Marijuana Doesn't Increase Your Risk of Going Crazy," "Innocent Teenage Girls Forced to 'Jump Up and Down' During Marijuana Search," "Can You Name One Good Thing About the War on Marijuana?," "Opponents of Marijuana Legalization Will Say Anything," "A Surprise Encounter with Former Drug Czar John Walters," "Obama Seeks Volunteer Drug War Soldiers," "An Awesome Marijuana Debate on the McLaughlin Group," "US Admits Failure, Calls Off Opium Eradication in Afghanistan," "Boring Drug War Reporting from the Mainstream Press," "Marijuana Expo Draws 20,000 to LA Convention Center," "I Went to Visit Will Foster in Jail a Couple of Nights Ago."

With US and NATO policies for dealing with the Afghan poppy group undergoing quite radical shifts -- giving up on eradication, treating traffickers as terrorists -- Gretchen Peters' exposé of the links between the traffic in prohibited drugs and the Taliban and Al Qaeda couldn't be more timely or more informative.

It's been a relatively quiet week on the corrupt cops front, with just two stories, but one of them is a real doozy.

Relations between Bolivia and the US just got a little rockier as the Obama administration declined to restore trade preferences, citing Bolivia's "encouragement" of coca cultivation, and Bolivian President Morales responded with hard words.

Here comes the National Guard! The Obama administration is planning to send 1,500 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to support drug war law enforcement there.

Voters in Oakland will decide whether to impose a whopping 1500% tax increase on dispensaries, and it's not an attack on them. In fact, it was the dispensaries' own idea. Talk about your good citizens.

Thanks to last minute action by the state Senate, Rhode Island will create a commission to explore all aspects of marijuana prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization. It will issue a report seven months from now. And Gov. Carcieri can't veto it.

Portugal has been getting good press over its decriminalization approach to drug use, including from unexpected places like the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Now, some Portuguese lawmakers are ready to take the next step. A bill to legalize the possession, cultivation, and sale of marijuana is being prepared.

Faced with a growing Taliban insurgency fueled by opium and heroin profits and inflamed by the destruction of farmers' fields, the US last weekend announced a dramatic shift in its Afghan anti-drug strategy. The US will abandon what has been a pillar of its anti-drug strategy worldwide: eradication.

Cops who confiscate legally permitted marijuana or plants from patients and growers in California could pay out the nose for their violations of the constitution, a California appeals court has ruled in the first decision of its kind. That just might rein in some of those renegade, recalcitrant departments who want to ignore a law they don't like.