A pair of North Carolina police accused of corruption are losing their jobs, but they won't be prosecuted, and their case seems to screw up a larger federal corruption case. In Pennsylvania, police are pressing some schools to allow drug dogs to perform searches during school hours, but at least some school officials are wisely holding out. Also last week, law enforcement officials don't even understand why someone would be transporting 3,800 gallons of liquid cocaine, and a court rules that police can't just slice open a teddy bear without a proper warrant.
]]>Thursday saw the launch of a new statewide medical marijuana initiative in the heartland. And in Canada a Charter of Rights and Freedoms case continues at the lowest court level in B.C., but which has the potential to eventually change not only Canada's medical marijuana laws, but also the marijuana laws.
]]>While Afghani opium supplies "90% of the world's demand", the Canadian National Post newspaper reports, the opium and heroin cause problems for users in Afghanistan, as well. There are a million "drug addicts" there, according to a 2005 U.N. study. 50,000 of them use heroin; 150,000 use opium. And the biggest single category of Afghan "addicts" according to the U.N.? Some 500,000 are "addicts" to "hashish".
In Mexico, president Felipe Calderon ordered some 30,000 "troops and police" to go "across the country" to try to suppress prohibition-related violence as drug cartels jockey for access to the lucrative U.S. illegal drug market in a series of bloody turf battles. While the Mexican government tries to spin this in a favorable direction, critics say the violence and killings aren't from government pressure so much as turf battles for market share. Cartels "act completely autonomous of the government; the government does not affect their operations nor their plans for business," said Jose Arturo Yanez of the Professional Police Training Institute in Mexico City.
And we leave you this week with disappointing news from the north, as Canada's right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper is said to axe the budget for Insite, North America's first and only supervised injection center, located in Vancouver, British Columbia. Harper has been a staunch supporter of the war in Afghanistan, but with Canadian casualties mounting up there, Harper needs to divert attention away from that quagmire, and what could be better than to ramp up the "war on drugs" at home? Sold as a crackdown on "grow ops" (i.e., anyone growing any number of cannabis plants) and "drug dealers", harm reduction budgets were cut as police budgets are set to swell. "There is no money for harm reduction, which is quite ominous for what will be," said Leon Mar of the Canadian HIV-AIDS Legal Network. Other critics of the PM's plan denounced the "U.S.-style war on drugs, an approach that has proven time and time again to be counter-productive and a tragic waste of public funds."
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