News Brief

Libertarian Free Staters are staging daily pot-smoking civil disobedience protests in Keene, New Hampshire, and this week, the protests spread to Manchester.

Mexico's foreign minister said this week that the high death toll in his country's drug war was a sign his government's policy was correct. If that's the case, he just got more confirmation, as the body count continues to rise.

The Bush administration warned Congress and the public that we had to allow federal agents to do surreptitious "sneak and peek" searches in order to fight terrorism. Funny how that worked out.

The State Department and President Obama have issued the annual, congressionally-mandated list of countries not complying with US drug war objectives. The only countries listed as not in compliance are three with which the US has chilly relations, while countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, elements of whose governments are deeply implicated in the drug trade, get a pass.

More fun for the Philly narcs, a New Jersey ICE employee goes down, and a Brooklyn drug squad supervisor gets off easy.

And then there were two: Pennsylvania's Board of Pharmacy has issued new regulations allowing pharmacies to sell syringes without a prescription. That leaves Delaware and New Jersey as the only states that don't.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon's war against drug cartels reached a milestone late last week, but not the kind he's looking for: This year's prohibition-related death toll has gone over the 5,000 mark.

Faced with thousands of drug tourists flooding into their towns each week, the mayors of two Dutch border towns ordered their cannabis coffee shops to quit selling marijuana as of Wednesday. Coffee shop owners went to court last week to block it, but so far with no luck.

Minneapolis has become the largest US city without a drug squad after the chief axed it as part of an effort to reduce a $5 million budget gap.

If you're a cop and you slug an innocent bystander in the face for no reason during a drug raid, it's going to cost your employer big time. At least that's what happened a couple of weeks ago in Minneapolis.