News Feature

Right now, all eyes are on November 4, but leading drug reform groups are already looking down the road to 2010 and beyond.

In 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy set goals of reducing marijuana and overall drug use. Despite artful manipulation of the numbers, ONDCP has failed at its stated goal, but it has managed to drive into treatment thousands of pot smokers who didn't need it.

Drug reform hasn't been much of an issue in the presidential campaign, but there are differences between the major party candidates -- and much larger differences between them and a trio of minor party candidates with solidly radical drug reform proposals. For whom to vote?

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.