Officials are still ironing out the wrinkles of medicinal cannabis regulation in Michigan.
Opponents of cannabis decriminalization in Massachusetts are raising concerns that the new law undermines efforts to keep schools drug-free.
Persistent farmers in North Dakota have been granted licenses to grow industrial hemp, but they still have the DEA to contend with.
]]>As drug deaths in Mexico skyrocket, this week Canadians learned that drug related deaths in Province of British Columbia have fallen to 10-year lows. This "startling turnaround" occurred when The Globe and Mail decided to check statistics compiled by the B.C. Coroners Service. The "turnaround" comes despite a steady drumbeat of reports insinuating deaths due to illegal drugs is at an all time high.
Yet another reminder this week of how spectacularly prohibition "don't prohibit worth a dime" when the Transcontinental newspaper in Australia let slip that the Port Augusta Prison had over a hundred "drug incidents" - despite the fact this it is a prison. Instead of denouncing drug prohibition as unworkable, opposition parties decided instead to make political hay over the issue, blaming "overcrowding" and offering up glittering generalities bespeaking the need for a "secure environment in which drugs do not reach prisons."
And finally this week from the U.K., former police chief Tom Lloyd (from Cambridgeshire) openly called for government to give heroin by prescription to addicts. "I have long argued in favour of prescribing heroin to addicts to reduce crime, harm to the addicts and the dreadful effects on local communities, because there is no drug that becomes more dangerous to the user or society when its production and distribution are handed over to violent criminals."
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