State & Local Executive Branches

Medical marijuana patient Will Foster's nightmarish odyssey in the American gulag continues. Now the one-time poster boy for sentencing reform is back behind bars in Oklahoma, where parole officials are using some funny numbers to try to extend his sentence.

Who has the lowest marijuana possession fine in the nation? Denver is poised to take that honor.

Largely impelled by tireless medical marijuana advocate Carl Olsen, the Iowa Pharmacy Board Wednesday held the first in a series of public hearings about possibly rescheduling marijuana so it could be used as a medicine under state law.

North Carolina is about to join the ranks of states and localities that have banned salvia divinorum. A bill has passed the legislature and awaits the governor's signature.

Talk of marijuana legalization is definitely in the air in California, but none of the announced major party gubernatorial candidates want to add to it. Yet.

Oregon has become the latest state to pass legislation enabling the farming of industrial hemp and, like North Dakota, they don't need no stinking federal licenses. But the DEA tends to disagree about that.

California's Proposition 36 "treatment not jail" law is likely to lead to neither treatment nor jail as its funding gets slashed by 83% because of the state's budget crisis.

As a state senator concerned with racial profiling, President Obama championed a bill requiring Illinois law enforcement agencies to report on traffic stops. The latest annual report is out and it's pretty much the same old story: Blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to be asked to consent to searches, but cops are much more likely to actually find contraband if the driver is white.

With Cook County (greater Chicago) Board President Todd Stroger saying he will not veto last Tuesday's passage of a marijuana decriminalization ordinance, it looks like decrim is a done deal -- at least in unincorporated areas of the county. The move also gives towns and cities in the county the option to adopt decrim as well.

Could decriminalization be coming to Chicagoland? The Cook County Board has approved it, but the Board president is making noises like he may veto it.