Drug War Chronicle

Kalamazoo has become the first Michigan city to pass an initiative making small time marijuana use or possession by adults the lowest law enforcement priority.

Sleazy, sleazy. That's what a Missouri drug court monitor is accused of being, plus we have a crooked Puerto Rican cop and a sticky-fingered Louisiana narc.

The US drug arrest rate has been declining slightly for the last four years, but is still more than double the rate at the beginning of Reagan's war on drugs in 1980, an analysis of FBI crime data has found.

Coffee shops in Holland's south will soon be closing their doors to foreigners, and the rest of the country is set to follow in another year.

Bolivia has restored diplomatic relations with the US after throwing out the DEA and the US ambassador three years ago, but the DEA is not welcome back.

An effort to put marijuana legalization on the November 2012 ballot has passed a first hurdle in Missouri.

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.

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.

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

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.