Prohibition

Thanks to last minute action by the state Senate, Rhode Island will create a commission to explore all aspects of marijuana prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization. It will issue a report seven months from now. And Gov. Carcieri can't veto it.

As the United Nations issues its annual World Drugs Report, UNODC head Antonio Maria Costa finally notices his anti-prohibitionist critics and fights back. The critics are glad to engage. More importantly, Costa's attack signals that the legalization movement is gaining momentum.

As the Senate debated the FDA tobacco regulation bill it approved yesterday, one Republican senator called his colleagues hypocrites and urged them to support an outright ban. Was it just posturing?

Taxi drivers' wake-me-up or terrorist drug threat? The herbal stimulant khat is popular with elements of America's immigrant East African population despite being banned by federal law. Now, Washington, DC, home to one of the nation's East African immigrant communities, wants its law to be as severe as federal law. A battle is brewing.

Drug War Chronicle reviews historian Paul Gootenberg's "Andean Cocaine," and finds its methods and its results most useful.

Confronted with an unregulated substance enjoyed by young people, the Colorado legislature is responding with a reflexive prohibitionist posture. BZP, meet the drug war.

The nation's first salvia possession case has ended not with a bang, but a whimper. At least no one is going to jail.

The British government contends that drug legalization could not possibly have enough benefits to justify switching from prohibition, but it has never provided the evidence. Now, a new study that actually has done a comparative analysis finds the UK could be saving billions a year by legalizing.

As Mexicos's plague of prohibition-related violence continues unabated, Washington is moving to beef up the border and the Mexican repressive apparatus. But for the first time, US officials are openly admitting that some of it is our fault, possibly opening the way for the discussion of drug legalization to move in from the margins.

Marijuana prohibition doesn't achieve its stated goals, it costs a lot of money, and use levels would be similar under a relaxed regime, a pair of University of Washington researchers report.