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When a Baltimore hustler clothing line manufacturer and barber named Rodney Bethea released a straight-to-DVD documentary about life on the mean streets of West Baltimore back in 2004 in a bid to further the hip-hop careers of some of his street-savvy friends, he had no idea “Stop Fucking Snitching, Vol. I” (better known simply as “Stop Snitching”) would soon become a touchstone in a festering conflict over drugs and crime on the streets of America and what to do about it.

A Malaysian man by the name of Razali Ahmad, a courier company clerk and first time offender, was sentenced to death for possession of less than two pounds of marijuana. This is considered trafficking in Malaysia and death by gallows is the mandatory sentence.

Drug policy chiefs have had few concrete successes in convincing the public or policymakers to retrench in the decades-long drug war. But when the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) held its international Drug Policy Reform conference in New Orleans recently there was the sense that its time – and place – were finally right.

In America, more than half a million people a year are arrested for some form of marijuana possession. Half of the people currently in the federal prison system are there for some form of drug possession. This striking trend, a trend whose origins we can attribute to President Nixon’s overzealous war on drugs campaign, has slowly began to gain recognition as an economically draining and futile effort.