Czech policemen have proposed that the seized marijuana be used for medical purposes -- for instance, for the treatment of patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease. The Justice Ministry does not oppose the idea. "It is certainly logical," Justice Minister Jiri Pospisil (senior government Civic Democrats, ODS)) said.

In a sign of the growing professionalization of the medical cannabis industry, Mark Rhoades and Ali Kashani, the owners of the Berkeley development company Citycentric Investments, have teamed up with Debby Goldsberry, a founder of the Berkeley Patients Group, to open a number of medical marijuana facilities around the East Bay. Goldsberry, Rhoades, and Kashani represent a new breed of medical marijuana entrepreneurs: people expert in land use policy, non-profit work, and running cannabis collectives. It’s a set of services that is growing in demand as more states adopt medical marijuana laws and as more people try to navigate the byzantine laws permitting medical marijuana in California.

In no state is the philosophical U-turn more abrupt than in Oklahoma, where last year the Legislature was barreling in the opposite direction. New Republican Speaker of the House Kris Steele is expected to unveil a package of proposals that would divert thousands of nonviolent lawbreakers from the prison system and ramp up paroles. Similar crash prison reductions are going on from coast to coast. Michigan has shuttered 20 correctional facilities and slashed spending by nearly 7 percent. South Carolina expects to reduce its inmate numbers by 8 percent by putting drug dealers, burglars and hot check writers into community programs instead of behind bars.

Publicity about people being caught with party drugs usually concentrates on those in their teens and 20s. So when the Austalian Labor aide Matthew Chesher, 44, was charged with possessing one ecstasy tablet last week, the lid was lifted on a quite different phenomenon: the growing number of middle-aged ecstasy users. The generation that championed the drug in the '80s and '90s is getting older.

A state commission says minority offenders in Illinois are far more likely to go to prison for minor drug crimes than whites are. Blacks, for instance, served time in 19 percent of low-level drug cases, while only 4 percent of white offenders were imprisoned.

A new set of draft rules for Arizona's medical marijuana program were published on the state Department of Health Services' website. The rules cover everything from applying for a patient or caregiver registered identification card, to revocation of identification cards, to dispensary information, including the application process.

A court handed down the death penalty to the former deputy head of anti-narcotics efforts in China's most populous metropolis, Chongqing. Luo Li had been collaborating with drug dealers in Chongqing since 2005 and took 1.2 million yuan ($233,038) in bribes to turn a blind eye to the activities of two of them, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing a court statement.

Wikileaks has published new documents about the correspondence of the US Embassy in Baku (BAKU 000917). This time the documents were published in Norway's Aftenposten and are about the Azerbaijani statements on drug trafficking through Armenian and the NKR territory.