Just hours before the state’s legislative session ended Tuesday, the California Assembly voted to approve SB 1449, Sen. Mark Leno’s bill to fully decriminalize simple marijuana possession. The bill passed the Senate in June and now goes to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk.

The freshly appointed National Drug Coordinator Jindřich Vobořil, who assumed his post on 1 July, has his hands full. Although the partial decriminalization of cannabis at the beginning of this year didn’t transform the capital into the new Amsterdam, as some headlines suggested, the accessibility of soft drugs, Vobořil says, has secured the Czech Republic one of the highest rankings in Europe regarding cannabis use.

According to a 2009 report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, for the third time in a row, Czechs rank among top four heaviest cannabis users in Europe, and almost half of those aged between 15 and 24 have used marihuana at least once.

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana ­ one of the front lines of this war ­ is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando ­ an event that no longer shocks the country.

IACM-Bulletin of 29 August 2010

Source: International Association for Cannabinoid Medicines (IACM)

29 August 2010

The Obama management unveils a new drug-control strategy that emphasize community-based deterrence and the role of doctors in screening for drug troubles, signaling a change in plan while continuing to cuddle key tenets of the decades-old war on drugs.

But as the policy outlined represents a new pin on several fronts, groups and critics of the drug war alike decided it’s not a major leaving from previous administration.