Executive Branch

Canadian "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery has already run up against US federal prison rules, and is sitting in solitary confinement as a result.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to help balance the budget by cutting out almost all Medi-Cal funding for more than 35,000 methadone maintenance patients. The nicest thing opponents can say about that idea is that it's penny wise but pound foolish, and the legislature seems to agree. But the Governator can still wield the line-item veto, so the fight isn't over yet.

In what is most likely a bid to blunt a campaign issue -- border security -- for Republicans in this year's off-year elections, the Obama administration is sending more than a thousand troops to the Southwestern border.

Canadian marijuana activist and entrepreneur Marc Emery has now begun a journey toward freedom that will most likely take him five years to complete. He pleaded guilty in Seattle Monday.

Canadian "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery is now a resident of the American drug war gulag. He was extradited from Vancouver yesterday. Don't we all feel a bit safer now?

Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson Monday signed the extradition for "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery to begin serving five years in a US federal prison for selling pot seeds over the Internet. He was jailed on the spot in Vancouver, and could be in the American gulag by the time you read this.

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.

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.

For five years, Dr. Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, operated a pain management clinic in Haysville, Kansas. Now, they are on trial as drug dealers in a federal prosecution that revisits the ongoing conflict between the imperatives of pain treatment and those of drug law enforcement.

The drug czar was in the hot seat at a Wednesday congressional hearing, and activists and academics got a chance to weigh in on the flaws of US drug policy as well.