Author Archives: Pete

Via Grits for Breakfast: After all, how many Steven Rodriguez’s could there be? The wrong Steven Rodriguez was arrested in front of his wife and four year old son for drug trafficking based on a warrant approved by a local … Continue reading →

Dying patient wrongly assumed to be junkie A very ill man, wrongly assumed to be a “junkie” craving strong drugs, died in agony hours after being discharged from a NSW hospital, a coroner has found. […] “If, as now seems … Continue reading →

I’ve just spent most of the past week as one of the judges of the Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival in Palatine, Illinois. Awards were announced this afternoon and will probably be posted online soon. It was quite an amazing … Continue reading →

“Can’t sugarcoat this,” said Judge Robert Richter. “To take somebody and threaten their life in that fashion. . . Smoking marijuana doesn’t make you do that. Somebody in college studying criminal justice should know.” This was from an article about … Continue reading →

Drug Czar Kerlikowske has rather famously pronounced on numerous times that he ended the war on drugs (basically by disavowing the term). This is part of his effort to pretend that the current administration is more focused on treatment and … Continue reading →

A disturbing piece at Al Jazeera about the proliferation of drug mules in the Philippines as the trend is for poor women to be drawn into working as drug mules (sometimes without even knowing what they’re carrying), and ending up … Continue reading →

Via Radley Balko: Mom sues Lawrence County over seizure of newborn For the second time in a year, Lawrence County Children and Youth Services has been accused in a federal lawsuit of removing a child from a mother’s custody after … Continue reading →

Iran leads the world in drug seizures United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Yury Fedotov has said Iran ranks first in the world in illicit drug seizures, Mehr news agency reported. Iran seizes 80 percent of … Continue reading →

Every now and then, it can be amusing to check referral logs. Today, someone using the U.S. House of Representatives Information System googled “drugged driving death statistics in california.” It took them to this page. I’m guessing it may not … Continue reading →

More and more, the attempt by the U.S. government to hide and obfuscate the truth about marijuana and the drug war just isn’t working. Not that many years ago, this kind of editorial in an American newspaper would be unthinkable. … Continue reading →