Drug Use

Another legislative season begins across the land, and with it comes another crop of bills demanding drug testing of people receiving public benefits, from unemployment to food stamps to state medical assistance. They're expensive, they're impractical, and they're most likely unconstitutional, but that doesn't stop drug war demagogues from promoting them.

A pair of sociologists get inside a San Diego area network of campus drug sellers and users to ask and answer the question of why privileged youth on the path to success would risk everything to peddle pot or pills. The short answer? They're not really very much at risk -- they're rich and white.

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.

If you're interested in the border or Mexico's drug war or drug culture or drug economy, or in drug law enforcement, we've got a book you need to read. University of Texas-El Paso sociologist and anthropologist Howard Campbell provides a vivid, rich, and nuanced portrayal of drugs and the drug war in El Paso-Juarez that couldn't be more timely.

In an address to an international health conference in Vietnam, the UN's top health rights official slammed forced "rehab camps" and called for decriminalizing drug use. As many as half million people could be locked up in punitive, old-school mass detoxification camps.

Drug users are organizing in Asia. After two years of meetings, the Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD) has been created in the vein of "nothing about us without us."

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has issued a dire new report warning that the Afghan opium trade is spreading addiction, disease, and insurgency. Too bad it doesn't address the role of global drug prohibition in exacerbating all these problems.

Does taking a hit off a joint merit a death sentence? A Hawaii insurance carrier thinks so, and it's not alone.

More than a quarter of American adults polled in a recent survey don't think simple drug possessors need to go to jail. That's a start.