News Brief

The Obama administration earlier this year gave up the delusion that eradication of poppy crops was a viable response to widespread Afghan opium production. But now the Russians, with soaring addiction rates because of Afghan heroin, are urging that the poppy fields be sprayed.

First, the Texas DA collaborated in a racially discriminatory and lawless asset forfeiture rip-off scheme directed at innocent motorists. Now, facing a civil lawsuit, she wants to use the very money she helped rip-off to pay for her defense. The ACLU has cried foul.

Cops busted for testilying, a deputy arrested for demanding a bribe from a pot grower, a jail guard arrested for smuggling pot into the prison, and a Michigan town still doesn't know who stole drug buy money from the police department.

Marijuana production and consumption has been a bone of contention in the South Pacific island republic of Fiji for years. Now, some comments from a leading NGO are heating up the controversy again.

It's been 20 years since Janet Reno established the first drug court in Miami. Now, there are more than 2,100 of them, but the nation's leading criminal defense attorneys' group says they are distorting justice and need serious reforms.

More than a year after the DEA quietly reported that a veterinary anti-parasitic agent was showing up in cocaine, and after at least two US deaths linked to the tainted drug, federal public health officials have finally issued an alert warning doctors, treatment centers, and public health professionals of the menace.

Global Marijuana March organizer Dana Beal and two friends are in hot water after being busted while heading east through Nebraska last week.

Nearly 40,000 died of drug-related causes in 2006, the vast majority of them overdoses. Dying on drugs is rapidly gaining on dying in car wrecks as America's leading accidental cause of death -- a grim demonstration of the failure of prohibition.

We would be remiss if we didn't mention Boston's annual Freedom Rally, the first since Massachusetts voters passed a state decrim law.

The Higher Education Act's "Aid Elimination Penalty," or anti-drug provision, is poised for further watering down after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would limit it to people with drug sales -- not drug possession -- convictions. But the provision's author, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) kept fighting almost until the end.