To the rites of middle-age passage, some families are adding another: buying marijuana for aging parents.

BC Hydro says the theft of electricity — mostly from drug prohibition-inspired marijuana grow operations — now costs $100 million every year. Hydro spokesperson Cindy Verschoor said that's a significant increase from the estimated $30-million revenue loss from electricity theft in 2006, the last time Hydro calculated the loss. She said it's because larger and more sophisticated grow-ops are sucking more power each year.

An elderly couple says sheriff's police on a drug raid smashed into their house late Thursday night, terrorizing them before admitting they had the wrong house.

A search for a missing American tourist presumably shot and killed by Mexican pirates on a border lake has been thwarted by threats of an ambush from drug prohibition gangs.

Residents in Ciudad Juarez, the epicentre of Mexico's bloody drug prohibition war, say authorities are going after small offenders and innocent people such as poor workers even as they allow powerful drug lords to operate with impunity. President Felipe Calderon is under pressure to show results in his offensive against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez where he has deployed more than 7,500 soldiers and police, making the crackdown a central part of his war on drug trafficking organizations. But rights groups say corrupt or ineffective police and soldiers have rounded up hundreds of drug addicts and ordinary people in the manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas without making major drug busts or arresting top capos.

 

 

Scientists concluded that cracking down hard on the marijuana and its users does not result in people using less of it. "Intensified enforcement of prohibition did not have the intended effects," said Professor Robin Room of Melbourne University. He said that outlawing cannabis "has contributed to increased rates of violence" and called for the drug to be legalized and regulated.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a new guideline intended to help ease the delay some nursing home residents face in receiving certain painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. The D.E.A. had not previously recognized nurses employed by nursing homes as the legal agents of doctors in conveying controlled substances prescriptions to pharmacists. The agency’s previous stance, critics said in an article last week in The New York Times, caused many nursing home residents to suffer in pain while they waited for their prescriptions.

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

Largely overlooked is the story of the estimated tens of thousands of children whose lives are blighted by drug prohibition violence. Neither Mexico's government nor the various independent groups studying organized crime keep track of the number of orphans who have lost fathers, and sometimes mothers too, to the drug prohibition war.

Democratic strategists are studying California's marijuana legalization initiative to see if similar ballot measures could energize young, liberal voters in swing states for the 2012 presidential election. Some pollsters and party officials say Democratic candidates in California are benefiting from a surge in enthusiasm among young voters eager to back Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in certain quantities and permit local governments to regulate and tax it. Party strategists and marijuana legalization advocates are discussing whether to push for similar ballot questions in 2012 in Colorado and Nevada — both expected to be crucial to President Barack Obama's re-election — and Washington state, which will have races for governor and seats in both houses of Congress.

Clashes between rival gangs created by drug prohibition in Mexico left 34 people dead over the weekend, and the beating death of a mayor is the fifth killing of a city leader in six weeks, the latest fallout from the country's deadly drug prohibition war.

The alleged shooting of a US boater by Mexican pirates on Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border, is raising fears about spillover drug prohibition violence from Mexico into the US.

In Colorado, California and Montana, where medical marijuana is legal, newspapers are enjoying increased ad revenue for this emerging market. This is most valuable at a time when newspapers are hurting for advertising, particularly classified ads, which have plummeted with the rise of online services like Craigslist.

The player unions representing soccer players and cricketers in England have called for recreational drugs to be removed from the World Anti-Doping Agency's prohibited list. "For the number of players who have tested positive for cocaine, the consequences are far from performance-enhancing and the outcomes in the majority of cases have been very negative," said John Bramhall, deputy chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association. Ian Smith, the Professional Cricketers' Association's legal director, agreed that recreational drug use isn't usually about gaining an unfair advantage, saying "Marijuana is not a big issue with cheating in sport -- let's get it off the (WADA) list."

The idea of making recent changes to Columbia police SWAT policy permanent could move ahead this week. Soon after police Chief Ken Burton made SWAT policy changes in May in response to a controversial February drug raid on Kinloch Court, Columbia resident Holly Henry requested that the council and the review board put the new policy into a city ordinance.

Yesterday marchers made the annual trek from Library Mall at one end of State Street to the Wisconsin State Capitol. Longtime Harvest Fest organizer Ben Masel estimated that around 3,200 people paraded this year. Not only were crowd numbers up, but attendees seemed very enthusiastic about flexing the activist muscles gained in the fight for medical cannabis in Wisconsin.

Dear friends:

I hope you'll join us for this special private fundraiser at a breathtaking and peculiar Sonoma wine country estate. 

Getting busted for having an ounce or less of marijuana in California is no longer that big a deal, or even a crime, under a new law signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead of facing a misdemeanor charge, people caught will a small amount of marijuana will now get, at most, a $100 fine. With everything else on his plate — a big budget deal, a landmark health insurance exchange — what might have motivated Schwarzenegger to decriminalize marijuana now?

As state medical marijuana laws push marijuana closer to Main Street, a few websites are starting to give it an updated, more understated image aimed at mainstream marijuana lovers outside the prototypical "stoner" demographic.

In the midst of the brutal drug prohibition war encroaching on their lives, thousands of Mexicans every morning check social network websites to see if they will encounter any unpleasant surprises on the way to work or school.

Russ Jones, a 10-year veteran with the San Jose Police Department and former Drug Enforcement Agency task force member, wants to legalize and regulate all currently illicit drugs.

Drug prohibition has incentivized Mexican drug trafficking organizations to come to our backyards. Their workers are hidden in crops and hillsides throughout rural Ohio counties.

Colorado is proposing a first-in-the-nation system to track medical marijuana "from seed to sell". The goal is to prevent people from using forged medical marijuana patient cards and to swiftly track down pot contaminated with mold or tainted marijuana food products and oils. Medical marijuana advocates say the all-seeing surveillance system smacks of Big Brother watching patients and worry it will drive up the cost of pot for patients living on fixed incomes.

A panel that advises the state on medical-marijuana policy voted Wednesday to allow major depression as a qualifying condition. About a dozen people — including a lawyer, a social worker and a woman who drove from Las Cruces — spoke Wednesday in favor of adding depression, and the panel agreed 5-2. No one spoke out against the addition.

Jeffrey A. Miron, a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, opines that drug legalization would not only promote specific policy objectives that are near and dear to conservative hearts, it is also consistent with core principles that conservatives endorse in other contexts.

A California ballot measure to legalize marijuana is now ahead in the polls. This has one of Utah's most prominent and outspoken politicians saying, someday, the drug will even be legal here in Utah. "To put people behind bars for possessing or smoking pot is absolutely absurd. It would make more sense to put people behind bars for smoking cigarettes," said former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.

Raul Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says that the spate of recent deaths may be no coincidence: It comes as the federal government is increasing intelligence capabilities and taking a harder look at collusion between traffickers and local police and authorities, as it looks to centralize the police force. Therefore, many mayors who once may have turned a blind eye to trafficking exploits in their towns might now be refusing to cooperate. “If the mayor is an obstacle, that is when the problem starts,” says Mr. Benitez.

Tom Chivers opines that the "Portugal Experience" suggests that decriminalization is exactly the right approach for the priorities of reducing drug use and reducing crime in the UK.

A mayor who took the job when every other official in his town quit out of fear of drug traffickers was reported slain, the fifth Mexican mayor killed in six weeks. Authorities said Gustavo Sanchez, mayor of the town of Tancitaro in Michoacan state, had apparently been beaten to death with rocks.

Mexican mayors have been forced to move to the US for safety in the face of threats from drug traffickers. Five mayors have been murdered in the past six weeks, with a total of 10 killed this year. About 15 mayors have been killed since President Felipe Calderon declared war on Mexico's drug traffickers shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Mike Meno, director of communications at the Marijuana Policy Project, opines that K2 bans are misguided because they don't address the core issue: millions of Americans want to use marijuana, or something that will mimic its effects, and if they're afraid about illegal means of doing so, they will continue to seek out legal alternatives.

Delia Lloyd opines on freedom of the press in Mexico being curtailed by prohibition-related violence. She concludes with "I've got news for you, Mr. President. You may not want to say it out loud, but Mexico has become Colombia."