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Many of these statistics we could have guessed; others we found very surprising. What are your thoughts?

Must see movie for anyone following the drug war. Those of you who not in the know, you definitely need to educate yourself.

Good advice, not just for smokers. Courtesy of Professor James Duane of Regent Law School.

Luckily for me, I’ve never been “convicted” of possession of marijuana. However, nearly a million people were less fortunate than I in the year 2007. Imagine what that figure would look like if they caught all of us “users.” I’ve probably smoked 5 days a week since 2001. That’s a shitload of potential busts I’ve managed to avoid. I hope some of the readers are knocking on wood for me, but hopefully the US will have a complete overhaul to current drug policies sometime in the near future. Anyone else not holding their breath?

Absent fathers, orphaned children and growing numbers of HIV and Hepatitis C infections are what some African Americans are facing due to the anti-drug policy, ‘war on drugs’.

The US government succeeds in over 90 per cent of its prosecutions, which indicates that the system is a stacked deck. US criminal justice is based on the plea bargain, which is essentially the exchange of immunity or a reduced sentence for inculpatory perjury against targeted people. It is an evil and repulsive system based on intimidation, suborned falsehoods, and impoverishment. Irish, British and Canadian prosecutors using these tactics would be disbarred.

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.