I live in the "almost as backwards as Mississippi" state of Alabama and in November of 2009 a North Alabama judge put the drug war in perspective for me.

The El Paso City Council is back with another drug policy reform resolution. LEAP has the details.

CBS won't let NORML buy a ridiculously huge ad in Times Square because it's too political, even though CBS ran a super-controversial anti-abortion spot during the Super Bowl.

Michael Savage hates marijuana. I don't even know where to begin with this. Listen at your own risk.

Pete Guither just ruined your spring break plans. Well, actually it's the drug war's fault.

In comments, Giordano questions the value of constantly confronting the President about marijuana legalization:

In the end, it makes no sense at all to ask Obama for anything more than what he’s already done for medical marijuana.  His candor on the subject of cannabis will probably wait for the day he’s no longer president, just as Bill Clinton waited before scoffing at U.S. marijuana penalties.

All of this is certainly worth explaining to anyone who genuinely expects the President to abolish marijuana prohibition. Yes, it's helpful to understand that he's not going to do that, neither next week nor on his last day in office. But I don’t think any willingness on the President's part to publicly support legalization is necessary to justify the strategic efficacy of hounding him about it at almost every opportunity.

I think we score points simply by making ourselves visible. Our early success at saturating the President's web forums was followed by an unprecedented surge in favorable media coverage. By the time the Michael Phelps saga erupted, we'd already established marijuana reform as one of the leading political issues on the internet. Web trends are measured in dollar signs like never before and we're now witnessing the rewards of our proven ability to generate clicks.

Obama's new medical marijuana policy followed on the heels of an epic escalation in positive marijuana reporting from the mainstream press. The White House's decision to leak the story to the AP on a Sunday night was a powerful exhibit in their newfound faith that you could actually score political points by placating people like us. It's hardly the end of marijuana prohibition, but it shows that we're doing something right.

The Conservative federal government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper will ask the Canadian Supreme Court to overturn a provincial court ruling that okayed Vancouver's InSite safe injection site. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said the government will appeal because the case raised important questions about the division of powers among the federal and provincial governments, the CBC reported Tuesday. InSite in the only supervised drug injection site in North America. It has been in place since 2003, when British Columbia health authorities won a temporary exemption from Canada's federal drug law. While the then Liberal government approved, the now governing Conservatives do not. InSite originally won a three-year exemption from the federal drug law. Under tremendous pressure, the Conservatives grudgingly gave InSite a 15-month extension, then extended it to 22 months ending in June 2008. But fearing the Conservatives' intentions, InSite operator the Portland Hotel Society, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and two InSite clients filed a lawsuit in the BC courts seeking to have the provincial government, which under Canadian law is responsible for health care, declared the sole authority over InSite—not the federal government and the federal drug laws. InSite and its supporters won in the BC Supreme Court in 2008 and won again last month in the province's highest court, the Court of Appeals. It is those decisions, which puts decisions on whether to keep InSite open firmly in the hands of BC health officials, that the federal government now seeks to overturn. In his remarks Tuesday, Justice Minister Nicholson said nothing about shutting down InSite, instead saying the appeal was about clarifying provincial versus federal powers. "The case we'll be presenting before the court is to ask for clarification," he said. "I think it is important to do that." But Portland Hotel Society director Mark Townsend was running out of patience with the Conservatives. "The courts have now ruled twice in favor of InSite," he said in a statement Tuesday. "Last time, they thought the feds were so out of line they made them pay all the costs. We wish Stephen Harper would stop wasting court time and the taxpayers' money and start helping to solve the drug problem in our community."

The Washington state Senate Friday passed SB 5516, the 911 Good Samaritan Act, on a vote of 47-1. One member was absent. The bill now goes to the House. The measure provides immunity from prosecution for drug possession offenses for overdose victims and people who seek medical assistance for overdose victims. It does not grant immunity from prosecution for drug distribution offenses. It also allows expanded access to naloxone, a powerful opiate antagonist that can bring people back from the brink of death from overdoses in a matter of moments. The bill comes as the number of drug overdose deaths in Washington state have increased from around 403 in 1999 to 707, or nearly two a day, in 2006. Drug overdose is now the second leading cause of accidental death in the state, second only to traffic accidents. The bill was opposed by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, who argued that because there was no budget for publicizing the bill, it would not affect drug-taking behaviors, and thus would be no more than another complicating factor in drug prosecutions. Drug overdose fatalities now outrank traffic accidents as the leading cause of accidental deaths in more than a dozen states. But only one state, New Mexico, has approved a Good Samaritan law. Now, perhaps Washington will be next.