News Brief

Observers of the drug war have long known about its racial disparities, but a new report from Human Rights Watch makes them glaringly obvious.

The influx to Dutch border towns with cannabis coffee shops of tens of thousands of Europeans each week from countries with more repressive cannabis policies has led to myriad problems in those border towns. Now, mayors of two of them say they will simply shut them down.

South Dakota has become the 14th state to ban salvia divinorum, based on little more than YouTube videos and the fear that somebody somewhere might be getting high for a few minutes.

An Illinois House committee has narrowly approved a medical marijuana bill. Now it's on to the next votes.

The Pew Center on the States has released a report noting that 1 in 31 Americans is either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Although two-thirds of them are probationers or parolees, it is prisons that are gobbling up the corrections budget. That needs to change, the report said.

The effort to legalize medical marijuana in Minnesota is taking up where it left off last year. A bill has now passed two Senate committees, and action in the House is expected shortly. But the Republican governor is still threatening to veto it.

When investigating a DC area cocaine dealer, police installed a GPS tracking device on his vehicle without bothering to obtain a search warrant. Now two leading civil liberties groups are urging a DC appeals court to rule such actions a violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Some 7,500 Mexican soldiers are flooding into Ciudad Juárez in a bid to blunt prohibition-related violence that has left about 2,000 people dead there since January 2008. Meanwhile, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff is headed to Mexico for talks on increased cooperation between the two neighbors.

Salvia divinorum must be some pretty potent stuff. It's driving legislators loco all across the country as they insist on banning it simply because somebody, somewhere might get high on it.

Kellogg may have miscalculated when it dumped Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps after the infamous bong photo surfaced. Not only did it stir up a boycott from marijuana activists, it now looks like it's hurting the food giant's reputation.