News Brief

For Mexico, drug prohibition is the deadly gift that keeps on giving. A thousand people have been killed in the past 40 days, and this year's death toll has now passed 6,000. And it seems to be accelerating.

Drug users are organizing in Asia. After two years of meetings, the Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD) has been created in the vein of "nothing about us without us."

According to a pair of recent opinion polls inspired by a presidential committee that recommended easing up on soft drugs and prostitution, Romanians favor the latter more than the former.

On Wednesday, a Massachusetts bill that would legalize marijuana got a hearing before the legislature's Joint Revenue Committee. That's a start.

Is this the year we finally see an end to the infamous crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity? A bill to do just that has passed the House Judiciary Committee, and now, Sen. Dick Durbin and nine cosponsors have introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

Vicente Fox sicced the army on the so-called drug cartels when he was president of Mexico, but now he says his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, has gone too far down that path. It's time for the troops to return to the barracks, he said over the weekend.

The world as we know it may indeed end in 2012, if the trend line in recent Gallup polls on marijuana legalization is any indication. More than half the people in the West now want to free the weed, and the figure is up to 45% nationwide.

A California Superior Court judge is blocking the city of Los Angeles from enforcing its moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries. This as local prosecutors declare that all dispensaries are illegal, and as their numbers continue to grow.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has issued a dire new report warning that the Afghan opium trade is spreading addiction, disease, and insurgency. Too bad it doesn't address the role of global drug prohibition in exacerbating all these problems.

Ciudad Juarez continues to earn the title of Mexico's drug war murder capital, but there was plenty of prohibition-fueled killing to go around this past week.