News Brief

The British government seems to think that if drug policy is not supported by science, you need to trash the science -- and the scientist -- not the failed policy. It fired a leading voice for science- and evidence-based drug policies last Friday for what amounted to heresy against official dogma.

No break in Mexico's prohibition-related violence as the death toll since December 2006, when President Calderon called in the army, has now topped 15,000. The latest victims include a US soldier gunned down in a Ciudad Juárez strip club with five other people.

A new poll of likely California primary voters has a majority in favor of maintaining marijuana prohibition, but the pollster said that should not be read as suggesting legalization initiatives will necessarily go down to defeat. Different polling questions and populations provide different results, he said.

The drug war corrodes the integrity of law enforcement in multiple ways, as we see this week: Testilying, sexual extortion, thievery, and the usual just plain old corrupt practices.

If you are trying to figure out which Latin American country will be the first to legalize marijuana, you can probably eliminate Chile. Support for legalization there is in the teens -- and declining.

Medical marijuana caregivers must actually know the patients for whom they are growing pot, the Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled. The opinion, if upheld on appeal, could put a crimp in the state's fast-growing medical marijuana industry.

In an address to an international health conference in Vietnam, the UN's top health rights official slammed forced "rehab camps" and called for decriminalizing drug use. As many as half million people could be locked up in punitive, old-school mass detoxification camps.

The DEA suffered its first spilled blood in Afghanistan Monday when three of its agents were killed in a helicopter crash that also took the lives of seven US soldiers. The chopper was returning from a drug raid when it went down.

Mexico's wave of prohibition-related violence grinds on, and Ciudad Juárez remains the epicenter.

New Hampshire will not become the 14th medical marijuana state -- at least, not yet. An effort to override Gov. Mark Lynch's veto fell two votes short in the state Senate Wednesday. Supporters vow to keep working.