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California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) told a press conference in his home town on February 23, 2009 that he had introduced a bill that would create a system of taxed and regulated legal marijuana sales and production. If the bill were to pass, California would become the first state in the nation to break so decisively with decades of pot prohibition.

Under the bill, AB 390, the state would license producers and distributors, who would pay an excise tax of $50 per ounce, or about $1 per joint. Anyone 21 or over could then purchase marijuana from a licensed distributor.

The tense relations between the Bush administration and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez grew even more strained this week as Washington and Caracas traded charges and counter-charges over Venezuela’s fight against cocaine trafficking. While it seems indisputable that cocaine trafficking through Venezuela has increased in recent years, the two governments are trading barbs over the extent [...]

Almost everybody knows about methamphetamine, that demon drug, that pharmacological equivalent of plutonium, stereotypically favored by toothless, uneducated white guys tweaking in trailer parks out in the sticks. Many fewer people are aware of Desoxyn, which is widely prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). And even fewer are aware that Desoxyn is nothing [...]

In its 2000 decision in Indianapolis v. Edmond, the US Supreme Court held that efforts to attack the drug trade by holding a checkpoint to look for drugs was a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures. In the years since then, a handful of [...]

According to Mexican press reports this week, Mexico’s Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD – Democratic Revolution Party) is preparing to consider legalization of the drug trade as a response to the wave of narco-violence that has swept the country in the last year and a half. Around 5,000 people have been killed in prohibition-related [...]

Petitioners for an initiative making adult marijuana offenses the lowest law enforcement priority on Hawaii’s pot-friendly Big Island failed to gather enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot, but it is going there anyway. After reviewing the signature count, the county council voted 5-4 to put the measure on the ballot.
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In a trial that garnered national attention because of the conflict between state and federal marijuana laws, a federal jury in Los Angeles Tuesday convicted the owner of a Morro Bay medical marijuana dispensary on five counts of violating federal drug laws. As was the case in previous federal prosecutions, the defense was not allowed [...]