State & Local Executive Branches

Tenaha, Texas, lies between Houston and the casinos of Shreveport across the Louisiana line. The town thought it hit the jackpot with a sleazy policing scheme, but now it may be coming up snake eyes.

The Minnesota medical marijuana bill has passed another pair of hurdles as it makes its way toward a hostile governor.

South Dakota has become the 14th state to ban salvia divinorum, based on little more than YouTube videos and the fear that somebody somewhere might be getting high for a few minutes.

More than 35 years after their passage, New York's Rockefeller drug laws appear to be on their last legs. But it's not a done deal yet, and the battle over what the final reform package will look like continues in Albany.

Those field drug test kits police use to test for the presence of illegal drugs are so unreliable they should be banned, researchers said Tuesday. A Hershey's candy bar, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, and Tylenol are just a few of the common items that generate false positives. Air was another.

The effort to legalize medical marijuana in Minnesota is taking up where it left off last year. A bill has now passed two Senate committees, and action in the House is expected shortly. But the Republican governor is still threatening to veto it.

The Pew Center on the States has released a report noting that 1 in 31 Americans is either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Although two-thirds of them are probationers or parolees, it is prisons that are gobbling up the corrections budget. That needs to change, the report said.

Salvia divinorum must be some pretty potent stuff. It's driving legislators loco all across the country as they insist on banning it simply because somebody, somewhere might get high on it.

The New Jersey senate passed a medical marijuana bill Monday, and the governor said Wednesday he would "absolutely" sign it. But it has to get through the Assembly first.

The three Atlanta narcs whose phony drug raid ended with the death of a 92-year-old woman were sentenced to prison Tuesday. Has the Atlanta Police Department learned its lesson? The sentencing judge certainly hopes so.