News Brief

A week after Denver voters for the third time in as many years signaled that marijuana users should not be arrested, city officials are moving -- reluctantly -- to implement a lowest priority initiative.

Tennessee's narc of the year gets busted, and cops in Boston and Buffalo cop pleas.

Pop music is full of drug references, researchers have found, most of them positive. Stop the presses!

A Tennessee medical marijuana bill saw a bunch of hostile witnesses, as the drug czar's office teamed up with the local religious right to try to nip it in the bud.

Two more drug offenders were executed last week in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is in a de facto contest with Iran, Indonesia, and Malaysia to see who is the world's leading killer of drug law violators.

A leading New Zealand drug policy think tank is trying to jump-start a national conversation on marijuana policy, and it looks like it's working.

Two weeks ago, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) managed to get an amendment passed barring federal funds from any city that opens a safe injection site. This week, thanks to the efforts of drug reformers, the measure was killed in conference committee.

With the West focusing new attention on West and Central Africa as drug transshipment points, NGOs meeting last weekend in Senegal said the effort was unbalanced, with little attention paid to demand reduction.

Three out of four marijuana reform initiatives -- medical marijuana, hemp, and lowest law enforcement priority -- won in small-town Hailey, Idaho, but a taxation and regulation initiative was narrowly defeated.

The leading of the main opposition party in Trinidad & Tobago called last week for a reassessment of marijuana prohibition. Too bad that after losing Monday's election, the party will have five years before it has another shot at power.