Personal Marijuana Use

Bent on flexing their "tough on crime" muscles and impervious to polls showing a majority of Canadians want to legalize pot, Canada's Conservatives have reintroduced a bill creating mandatory minimum prison sentences for growing as few as 6 pot plants or making any amount of hash. That's so last century, Ottawa!

Saturday saw the planet's cannabis nation hit the streets for part one of this year's bifurcated Global Marijuana Marches. Here's a report, with more to come next week.

Over the weekend, Newsweek published a leaked draft of the 2010 National Drug Control Strategy. No one is sure why it was leaked, or by whom. A pair of leading observers of federal drug policy dissect it for us.

Organizers of an initiative that would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of pot have handed in far more than the required number of signatures required to make the November ballot in Detroit.

Hard-line former Philadelphia DA Lynne Abraham is taking pot shots her successor, DA Seth Williams, over his policy of treating marijuana possession offenders more leniently. Williams and his crew are hitting back.

Can the Dutch ban foreigners from going to their famous cannabis cafes? The city of Maastricht tried it, and now the European Court of Justice will decide whether the move conflicts with the European Union's laws regarding free trade.

Reed College in Portland, Oregon, has a decades-old reputation for rigorous academics and counterculture values. Now, after two Reed students died of heroin overdoses in two years, state and federal prosecutors are lowering the boom, starting with this weekends' annual end of school-year party.

It wasn't just the scent of pot smoke that hung in the air over 4/20 events around the country this week, it was the sense of imminent change. And even drug reform leaders who had been leery of such Cannabis Nation celebrations are coming to grips with their grassroots.

Two national polls on marijuana legalization came out this week. One lowballs support levels at 33%, while the other is in line with other recent polls at 44%. In either case, we're not over the top yet, except maybe out West.

A majority of Canadians think marijuana should be legalized, according to a new poll. They also approve of harm reduction -- even if the Conservative government doesn't.