Executive Branch

Will 2010 be the year the first state legalizes marijuana? If California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and Washington Representative Roger Goodman have their way, two states will do so.

The war in Afghanistan, the rising tide of drug reform in Latin America, and battles over drug policies in European countries are among the dominant international drug policy stories of 2009. (Next issue we'll review the top domestic stories.)

And then there were 14! The last congressional obstacle to the District of Columbia actually being able to implement its medical marijuana law has fallen. Now, DC bureaucrats and would-be medical marijuana entrepreneurs are scrambling.

The Drug Policy Alliance's 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference took place in Albuquerque last weekend. It was quite a show. Here's a scene report.

At a conference last week, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda bluntly accused the Mexican military of murdering members of the so-called drug cartels to avenge its own losses in the country's bloody wave of prohibition-related violence.

The Drug Policy Alliance's 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference got underway Thursday in Albuquerque, and it looks like the biggest yet. Here's an initial report from the conference opening. Look for much more next week, too.

For years, Congress never met a mandatory minimum drug sentence it didn't like. But now, with the Democrats in charge and the federal prison population nearly 10 times as large as it was three decades ago, Congress is having second thoughts. It has ordered the US Sentencing Commission to take a look.

For years, federal prosecutors on the US-Mexican border have been so swamped with smuggling cases that they refuse to prosecute busts under 500 pounds. Local prosecutors can't handle the overflow, either, so now, the US is sending busted Mexican pot smugglers back home to be prosecuted.

Nearly a quarter of a million American veterans were behind bars in 2004, many of them for drug abuse-related offenses, a new report finds. While the military, the Veterans Administration, and other agencies are taking some steps to help them, there is much more that could -- and should -- be done.

Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) has reintroduced the Truth in Trials Act, which would allow medical marijuana providers prosecuted under federal law to introduce medical evidence during their trials.