News Brief

The future of Holland's pragmatically tolerant approach to cannabis sales is up for debate this year. A government commission has recommended making the coffee shops "members only," but also legalizing the supply of cannabis to the coffee shops. Neither is likely to fly within the broader European Union context.

A crooked Chicago cop goes to prison and a pair of jail guards get stung.

It's not just teachers, health care, and parks that are facing the budget axe in California. Some state narcs could be out of a job, too.

Things are getting very bloody in Afghanistan as thousands of US Marines pour into Helmand province, the country's opium capital, in a bid to drive out the Taliban.

Cops who confiscate legally permitted marijuana or plants from patients and growers in California could pay out the nose for their violations of the constitution, a California appeals court has ruled in the first decision of its kind. That just might rein in some of those renegade, recalcitrant departments who want to ignore a law they don't like.

Voters in Oakland will decide whether to impose a whopping 1500% tax increase on dispensaries, and it's not an attack on them. In fact, it was the dispensaries' own idea. Talk about your good citizens.

Thanks to last minute action by the state Senate, Rhode Island will create a commission to explore all aspects of marijuana prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization. It will issue a report seven months from now. And Gov. Carcieri can't veto it.

"It's about rope, not dope" was the message as the Oregon House passed a bill allowing for industrial hemp production. It already passed the Senate, and the governor is expected to sign it, but it passed by veto-proof majorities if he doesn't. Still, the federal prohibition on hemp production in the US remains an enormous obstacle.

It's been a relatively quiet week on the corrupt cops front, with just two stories, but one of them is a real doozy.

Relations between Bolivia and the US just got a little rockier as the Obama administration declined to restore trade preferences, citing Bolivia's "encouragement" of coca cultivation, and Bolivian President Morales responded with hard words.