Drug War Chronicle #500 - September 7, 2007

We in the drug reform movement have so many good reasons to stand on, that it is hard to know where to begin when telling people about them. When we succeed in ending prohibition, the world will become a better place, in ways that are urgently needed.

The UN announced last week that Afghan opium production had increased yet again. Now, pressures to combat it with aerial spraying and increased Western military involvement are mounting, but the experts say that's a path to nowhere.

A lowest law enforcement priority initiative for adult marijuana use is headed for the ballot in Denver, and local officials who oppose it are taking a beating from its proponents.

The science of methamphetamine is contested terrain. Here, occasional contributor John Calvin Jones dissects a recent piece of methamphetamine research and finds it lacking.

Massive increases to our web site traffic, particularly during the last three months, have forced us to upgrade our web server -- not once, but twice -- and have increased our costs. We need your help to pay for it.

Marijuana critics who take beer company money, drug testing and hard drug use, Obama and New Orleans drug war, feds raid paraplegic, "Don't Smoke Pot in Your Car," John McCain and another lost war, more...

Busy, busy, busy. Take a week off, and look what happens: Cops peddling pills, guards stealing pills, cops shaking down housing project residents, jail guards smuggling drugs, a DEA agent giving information to suspected mobsters, and more.

The ACLU is challenging the seizure of nearly $24,000 dollars from a New Mexico trucker by the DEA as part of its asset forfeiture program.

A lawsuit filed by a Santa Cruz medical marijuana co-op and the city and county of Santa Cruz to try to block federal raids on providers in California is down but not out after an adverse ruling by a federal judge.

The Pennsylvania Pharmacy Board has unveiled a proposed rule that would allow for the purchase of up to 30 needles without a prescription. The move is a harm reduction measure intended to reduce the sharing of injection equipment by drug users and thereby reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

Legislators in the Czech Republic are preparing an amendment to the penal code that should lessen penalties for marijuana possession and growing.

Despite his publicly expressed reservations about the DEA -- and the demonstrated failure of the war on drugs -- Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is bellying up to the counter-narcotics assistance trough. He wants a billion dollars from Washington to fight the Central American drug trade.

Faced with a thriving cocaine trade using its territory as a stopover on the way to European markets, the government of the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau is threatening to blow drug planes out of the sky.

A major gathering of drug reform forces is planned for late this year, and special registration rates are available for those who plan early.

Tierney blog on legalization and pain prosecutions, Transnational Institute on Colombian coca and Afghan opium, drug offense death penalties as international human rights violation, net Asian Drug Users Network, DrugTruth Network update.

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

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The Marijuana Policy Project is hiring for their Director of Government Relations position based in Washington, DC.

The DC-based think tank is hiring a new leader as it moves forward seeking to end society's reliance on incarceration and promoting effective solutions to social problems.

The International Harm Reduction Development Program (IHRD) of the Open Society Institute (OSI) is offering small grants to support the collection and presentation of information that evaluate the health and human rights consequences, with regard to injection drug use-driven HIV infections, of the resolutions taken at the 1998 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs.

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