DEA

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

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.

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.

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.

In the violent and volatile world of Mexican drug cartels, no alliance is forever. Now, the Zetas have grown too threatening, and the other cartels are joining forces against them. Meanwhile, Chapo Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel have taken Ciudad Juarez.

Will Marc Emery really be sent to prison in the US for five years for selling pot seeds over the Internet? The decision is now in the hands of Canada's justice minister, and Emery and his allies are campaigning to block his extradition.

The DEA's efforts to subvert administration policy favoring state medical marijuana laws is not winning it any friends, and is gaining it some powerful new opponents.

A series of DEA raids on medical marijuana growers and labs in Colorado in recent weeks is raising serious questions about whether the Denver DEA is following Justice Department policy... or whether the Obama administration's stance on medical marijuana is shifting back toward the bad old Bush days.

President Obama has vowed to slash discretionary federal spending, but it isn't going be done on the back of the drug war. Federal drug control spending is up 3.5% in his Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Mostly it's the same old, same old drug war, but there are some interesting surprises.

The Obama administration has nominated the acting DEA administrator to be permanent DEA administrator. But this veteran DEA agent carries some baggage with her, and drug reformers are looking for ways to challenge the nomination.