Drug War Chronicle

One New Jersey prison guard gets indicted and another gets sentenced. There's also another Customs officer lured by lucre, a meth-slinging Indiana cop, and a Colorado cop turned pill provider.

Some legislators never met a psychoactive substance they didn't want to prohibit. Kansas state Sen. Peggy Mast (R) is one of them. Now, she wants to do to K-2 what she's already done to salvia divinorum and jimson weed.

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A dirty Philly cop gets smacked hard, a dirty St. Louis cop gets his hands slapped, and two more jail and prison guards get caught.

To be a caregiver or not be a caregiver? That is the question in Colorado, and the criminal courts, civil courts, state bureaucrats, and the medical marijuana industry are all fighting over it.

In a historic shift of position, the American Medical Association now says that marijuana is medicine, more research is needed, and its status as a Schedule I drug should be reviewed.

For years, Congress never met a mandatory minimum drug sentence it didn't like. But now, with the Democrats in charge and the federal prison population nearly 10 times as large as it was three decades ago, Congress is having second thoughts. It has ordered the US Sentencing Commission to take a look.

With both the White House and Capitol Hill under the control of Democrats, there are signs that the Bush-era blockade of federal drug reform legislation is ending. Here's an update on what's moving -- and what's not -- on Capitol Hill this year.

Two weeks ago, Britain's home secretary fired the government's head drug policy advisor, Professor David Nutt, over Nutt's criticisms of government drug policy as driven by politics and not evidence. The row continues, as three more members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs resigned this week, bringing the total to five.