Budgets/Taxes/Economics

Florida's medical marijuana initiative will go to the voters in November, the DEA administrator is being both jeered and cheered for her criticism of President Obama's remarks on marijuana, the Supreme Court makes it harder to punish drug dealers for deaths related to their wares, and much more.

Marijuana law reform bills just keep coming, a most likely unconstitutional food stamp drug test bill gets filed in Georgia, Australian regulators block urine drug testing of state energy company workers, Jamaicans legalizers grow impatient, and more.

San Francisco's district attorney and San Diego's police chief have filed an initiative that would defelonize most drug possession and other nonviolent crimes. But will they try to get it on the ballot in 2014?

They may be smoking more pot in Washington state than anyone thought, the Florida medical marijuana signature-gathering campaign is going down to the wire, opium production is up in the Golden Triangle, and aerial eradication is paused in Colombia (after planes get blown out of the sky). And more.

Medical marijuana gets attention in the statehouse, another drug war atrocity in New Mexico, Greece's first safe injection site is open, and a gram of opium or a few pounds of pot can get you the death penalty if you're in the wrong place. And more.

The momentum for marijuana legalization continues in the US, but Australia's New South Wales rejects medical marijuana even for the terminally ill. There's plenty more news, too.

New York's attorney general has examined the stop-and-frisk tactics of the NYPD in a new report. Only a miniscule fraction of stops result in an arrest for a serious crime, he found.

A Maryland gubernatorial candidate and a Maine legislator both call for marijuana legalization, politicians are in trouble for using drugs (at least one of them a bonafide hypocrite for it), and marijuana law reforms appear to be advancing internationally, except in one Australian state. That's just for starters.

There's a lot going on in the world of drug policy. Here are the stories we noted in our new Chronicle AM daily survey this week.

Fed up with endless recycling of low-level, problematic drug offenders through the criminal justice system, Seattle and King County have embarked on a "treatment not arrest" pilot program designed to break the cycle.