News Brief

Chakib El Khayari runs a human rights group in Morocco's Rif Mountains, where marijuana cultivation is a way of life. He has run afoul of the Moroccan government for criticizing its policies toward the poor pot farmers, and an appeals court has just ruled he should stay in a jail. Human rights and drug reform groups consider him a prisoner of conscience.

A sticky-fingered North Carolina deputy gets busted, so does a Florida sheriff's evidence tech, and a home-invading, drug dealer-robbing Philly cop gets sent away for a long, long time.

Israel is one of the few countries that allows for medical marijuana use, and this week saw forward movement on a couple of important fronts.

The carnage continues. This week an American citizen is among the casualties, but it looks like she was the victim of a soldier's inadvertent discharge.

If the British government thought it could shut up David Nutt, the head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, by firing him, it thought wrong. Now, the newly liberated drug expert is calling for a Royal Commission to examine decriminalizing marijuana.

The era of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses has come to an end in Rhode Island. But that's just a start -- you can still get up to 50 years for 10 pounds of pot.

Los Angeles has been trying to regulate its mushrooming medical marijuana dispensaries for four years. It could be coming down to the wire next week, but storm clouds loom as city and county prosecutors argue that any medical marijuana sales are illegal.

At a conference last week, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda bluntly accused the Mexican military of murdering members of the so-called drug cartels to avenge its own losses in the country's bloody wave of prohibition-related violence.

For years, Congress never met a mandatory minimum drug sentence it didn't like. But now, with the Democrats in charge and the federal prison population nearly 10 times as large as it was three decades ago, Congress is having second thoughts. It has ordered the US Sentencing Commission to take a look.

Two weeks ago, Britain's home secretary fired the government's head drug policy advisor, Professor David Nutt, over Nutt's criticisms of government drug policy as driven by politics and not evidence. The row continues, as three more members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs resigned this week, bringing the total to five.