In the Western U.S., a federal appeals court ruled that cities can drug test employees, but not necessarily all employees (not part-time library workers, for example). In Illinois, a well-respected high school newspaper adviser is suspended for allowing an article perceived by administrators as pro-marijuana. And, in Florida, the legislature is starting to see the need for prison reform, particularly in regards to non-violent drug offenders. The governor, unfortunately, still doesn't get it.
]]>Patients and law enforcement officials took predictable sides in Sacramento County, where supervisors ultimately rejected a call to abide by state law and implement a medicinal cannabis consumer identification card program.
A survey of Canadian physicians found that many are prescribing larger doses of cannabis to registered patients than Health Canada recommends, giving little if any consideration to the risk of overdose.
The Guardian UK published some entertaining excerpts from a new book on organized crime, including a chapter on "BC Bud" and the adventure and affluence to be had smuggling it into the United States.
]]>After the multi-year and multi-billion dollar failed pork-barrel boondoggle of "Plan Colombia" (attempting to budge the U.S. cocaine 'street price' by dousing rainforest with plant poison), the "balloon effect" appears spectacularly once again, this time in the direction of the Brazilian rainforest. Last week reports of "the first known coca plantations" in the Brazilian Amazon surfaced in the media.
As the BZP "party pill" ban comes into effect in New Zealand, authorities fear potential BZP use might balloon into something else, like "Neuro Blast" (said to have a pinch of diphenyl prolinol to perk up parties), or perhaps TFMPP (3-Trifluoromethylphenylpiperazine) - both legal, currently.
In Australia, after a long string of all types of reefer madness in a Geelong Advertiser newspaper piece this week, the editorial ends with the observation those who use cannabis should not be jailed, by concluding, "Jail, after all, is hardly the way to tackle mental health." Good point: authorities never believed the reefer madness in the first place, or else they would have put cannabis users in mental hospitals, not jail.
Stop jailing drug users was the same conclusion the U.K. Drug Policy Commission came to this week, also. Jail isn't "the solution" to "drug crime" says the commission, as drug use is increasing and "heroin use is now more widespread than cannabis," in prison.
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