News Brief

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.

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.

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.

More than a decade ago, Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled that drug possession was not a prosecutable offense. Now, President Uribe is moving to undo that, but the country's Supreme Court has put a roadblock in his path by upholding that ruling.

Indonesia has a new drug law, but it looks pretty much like business as usual for Southeast Asia, home of some of the world's harshest drug laws.

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.

Anti-medical marijuana zealot San Diego DA Bonnie Dumanis has struck again. A series of raids yesterday resulted in 31 arrests and 14 dispensaries shuttered. The DEA was there, too.

It was strike two Monday for the Church of Cognizance and its argument that its members have a religious right to use marijuana. The Arizona Supreme Court rejected that claim from a church member. Last year, a federal court rejected a similar claim from church founders Dan and Mary Quaintance, who are currently in federal prison.