News Feature

Canadians go to the polls in national elections this month, but there has been little talk of drug reform, and two pro-reform parliamentary candidates were forced off the ballot after videos of past drug use surfaced on YouTube.

Election day is just over a month away. Here's a breakdown of drug policy reform and sentencing initiatives (not all of them good) on various state and local ballots November 4.

Unleashed by a pair of US Supreme Court rulings, the Bush administration has been pushing random suspicionless drug testing of students. They've been having some success, but have also engendered a vigorous opposition movement.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums this week released polling data showing surprising levels of support for reform of our draconian mandatory minimum sentencing structure.

In its annual act of diplomatic hubris, the US government this week released its list of "major" drug producing and trafficking countries. Only three of them -- all political foes of Washington -- were found wanting.

Coming off a summer symposium that brought together experts in criminal justice and sentencing issues, the US Sentencing Commission has announced that it is making alternatives to incarceration one of its priorities for the coming year. With a record 200,000-plus people in federal prison -- more than half of them drug offenders -- that is a good thing.

In November, California residents will vote on a massive, complicated "treatment not jail" initiative known as the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act (NORA) and appearing on the ballot as Proposition 5. Battle lines are now being drawn.

The Higher Education Act (HEA) drug provision bars students with drug convictions from obtaining financial aid for specified periods. The John W. Perry Fund was created to help some of those students and to raise awareness of the injustice of the provision. This year, it is helping two students stay in school.

Washington and Caracas traded barbs over Venezuelan cooperation (or the lack thereof) with US drug fighters this week.

After more than a decade of conflict and confusion over California's medical marijuana laws, state Attorney General Jerry Brown Monday issued a series of guidelines for patients, providers, and police designed to specify just what is and is not allowable under the law.