News Brief

On New Year's Day, the Czech Republic will join Portugal among European countries that have decriminalized drug possession for personal use. The Czech cabinet Monday approved quantity limits on the amounts that will be decriminalized.

Amnesty International accuses the Mexican military of human rights violations in the drug war -- a problem for US funding. Meanwhile, this year's south of the border prohibition-related death toll passed 7,000 this week.

Congressional budget negotiators have approved a conference committee bill that ends the ban on federal funding of needle exchange programs, ends the ban on the District of Columbia funding of needle exchange programs, and ends the ban on the District enacting a medical marijuana law approved by voters a decade ago. Oh, and it also slashes funding for the drug czar's ineffective youth anti-drug media campaign.

More problems in the NYPD, "Starsky and Hutch" are being investigated in Camden, and a Florida cop heads to prison for tipping off drug traffickers.

Woo-hoo! The end times are upon us. For the second time this year, a national public opinion poll reports majority support for legalizing marijuana.

Finally, some sanity in Houston! The Harris County District Attorney has announced that beginning January 1, people caught with trace amounts of drugs or drug paraphernalia with drug traces will no longer be charged with felonies.

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.

Testilying -- the practice of police perjuring themselves to get an arrest or win a case -- is so prevalent in the NYPD that something has to be done, a federal judge complained this week.

There are at least three marijuana legalization initiative campaigns under way in California, but Richard Lee's "Tax and Regulate Cannabis 2010 campaign" is the first to announce it has achieved its signature-gathering goals. Lee says they need 434,000 and they will end up with 700,000.

The Dutch government is pondering a further tightening of the screws on Holland's famous cannabis coffee shops, but Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen doesn't want a one-size-fits-all policy based on problems with border town "drug tourism."