Methamphetamine

Millions of innocent Americans suffering from colds may soon be paying for the sins of meth cooks, for whom that medicine that relieves your symptoms is the key ingredient in the recipe.

Last year, the Czech parliament voted to decriminalize the possession of "small amounts" of drugs. Now, as the clock ticks toward January 1, when the new penal code takes effect, the cabinet is finally determining just what "small amounts" are.

Police in Utah who cleaned up meth labs in the 1980s and 1990s have filed dozens of workers compensation claims asserting exposure to the caustic chemicals caused a variety of physical ailments. Now, those claims are being dismissed for lack of evidence.

Modesto, California, is a sleepy, dusty, economically struggling small city in California's Central Valley. With high levels of methamphetamine and other injection drug use, it is a locale crying out for needle exchange programs. But local officials disagree, and when activists did it anyway, they got busted. Now, they're fighting back.

Faced with high levels of methamphetamine use, the New Zealand government is moving to require prescriptions for cold and flu medications containing pseudoephedrine, and just in time for the swine flu. It's got some other anti-meth measures coming, too.

The drug policy wheel is turning, and the US and its hard-line repressive drug policies are becoming increasingly isolated in the hemisphere as in the past week alone 150 million Latin Americans came under one form of decriminalization or another.

A bill that decriminalizes the possession of small amounts of drug for personal use is now the law of the land in Mexico. Although there was some doubt President Calderon would approve it, it appeared in the official gazette Thursday. It also includes provisions to allow the state and localities to go after small-time drug dealers, a power previously reserved to the federal government.

Just a couple of weeks after dishing out a few billion dollars more for the drug war in the emergency stimulus bill, Congress is at it again in the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill. More money for Byrne JAG grants, more money for Plan Mexico, and just a tiny bit less for Plan Colombia.

Does meth use equal child abuse? The New Mexico House thinks so.

Ever eager to charge at windmills in the name of the war on drugs, two US senators have reintroduced a bill that addresses a non-existent menace and threatens to increase prison sentences for people who aren't the intended target.