News Brief

Heads not attached to bodies keep popping up in unexpected places in Mexico. Yet another gruesome reminder of the prohibition-related savagery wracking the country.

Afghan opium cultivation and production figures this year should be similar to 2009, the UN said in a report this week. That means that Afghanistan is still producing 40% more opium than is needed to supply all the world's junkies.

The European death toll from heroin apparently contaminated with anthrax has risen to 11 as England reported its first death Wednesday. There have been nine more in Scotland and one more in Germany, leading to fears the contamination is widespread. The official response is still mainly limited to telling users to stop.

People are dying from drug overdoses at the rate of nearly two a day in Washington state. Now, the state Senate has passed a bill that could reduce that toll by encouraging people ODing or their friends to seek medical help.

Canada's Conservatives don't know when to quit. They've lost twice in a court battle over Vancouver's safe injection site, and now they're trying yet again.

Although Scottish authorities have yet to find any dirty dope, they have found another heroin user dead of anthrax.

Nearly a thousand people were killed in Mexico's unrelenting plague of prohibition-related violence last month alone. At this rate, another 10,000 will die by year's end.

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.

A Missouri Senate committee with more moralistic wrath toward the poor than common sense has passed a bill that would require welfare applicants and recipients to be drug tested under "reasonable suspicion" and thrown off the rolls for three years if they test positive -- even though the legislature's own analysts say the bill would cost far more than it would save.

Stunned by the proliferation of medical marijuana patients and dispensaries, the Colorado Senate voted Monday to impose restrictions on "pot docs."