News Brief

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.

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

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.

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.

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.