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Arkansas' judicial officials are questioning whether Washington-Madison County Drug Court, a popular local television program, should be aired. An opinion from the Arkansas Supreme Court Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee, issued Thursday, appears to quash any thought of taking any version of the show national and questions whether it should continue to be broadcast locally. The committee members, two retired judges and a law professor, issued a scathing opinion saying they had concerns with any broadcast of drug court proceedings.

A Detroit-area judge is allowing some defendants arrested in a series of raids to keep using state-approved medical marijuana while out on bond.

More women are working and dying for powerful, unregulated drug traffickers in Mexico's most violent city as high unemployment along the U.S. border sucks desperate families into the lethal, prohibition-driven trade. A record 179 women have been killed by rival hitmen so far this year in Ciudad Juarez, the notorious city across from El Paso, Texas, as teenage girls and even mothers with small children sign up with the drug trafficking organizations.

On August 25, the Los Angeles Times published an open editorial written by six former US drug czars referring to cannabis policies in the Netherlands while voicing their opposition to California's Proposition 19. On September 2, ENCOD president Fredrick Polak sent an open letter to the LA Times.

Times are good for marijuana growers of Mexico's western Sierra Madre mountains -- the army eradication squads that once hacked at the illicit marijuana fields have been diverted by the drug war raging elsewhere in Mexico. To the delight of traffickers, marijuana cultivation soared 35 percent last year and is now higher than at any time in nearly two decades.

Yet more evidence that the tired statement made by prohibitionists that "marijuana is a gateway drug" is false. Researchers said the predictors of whether someone uses harder drugs are social factors such as income status, psychological stress levels, employment status/potential, race and ethnicity, etc., not whether they ever smoked pot before. [Of course, more than a decade ago Institute of Medicine research conducted at the behest of Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- then the U.S. drug czar -- concluded "There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs", and that marijuana has been mistaken for a gateway drug in the past because "Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana -- usually before they are of legal age."]

Michigan’s medical marijuana law had its first dramatic day in an Oakland County court as a dozen people arrested in a medical marijuana raid on August 25 came before a judge for preliminary exams.

Drug traffickers exert influence over 71 percent of Mexico’s 2,439 municipal governments and completely control 195 of them. Criminal groups find it easy to dominate municipalities because local administrations are chronically short of money and suffer from neglect on the part of the state and federal governments.

Americans for Safe Access, the country's leading medical marijuana patient advocacy group, issued letters today to more than 140 localities across California with bans on distribution, demanding that they come into compliance with state law. The letters were sent two weeks after California's Fourth District Court of Appeal issued a long-awaited decision rejecting the argument that local or state dispensary laws are preempted by federal law.

The FDA has approved a new sublingual film formulation of the opioid dependence treatment combination buprenorphrine/naloxone (Suboxone).

Young British workers on the island of Ibiza appear to agree that a wave of drug prohibition raids over the past weekend will have no impact.

A Sacramento, CA dispensary — run by a conservative Christian — makes history with a television commercial touting the benefits of medical marijuana.

Increasing drug prohibition violence in Mexico poses a risk to the nation’s credit rating in the “medium term” and may threaten economic growth. The violence is shaving 1.2 percentage points off the economy annually, Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero said today. Moody’s probably won’t downgrade the country before President Felipe Calderon’s term ends in 2012.