Budgets/Taxes/Economics

The number of people doing time in state prison declined last year for the first time since bell-bottom jeans were in fashion, although just barely. Could we be seeing the first rumblings of a seismic shift in prison population trends?

Republican House members in Missouri convinced their colleagues to pass a bill mandating drug testing for welfare recipients and applicants, but Democrats are filibustering the bill in the Senate.

In 1913, the El Paso city council became the first in the country to outlaw marijuana. Now, faced with the horrendous prohibition-related violence across the river in Ciudad Juarez, it has passed a resolution condemning current drug policies, but only after dropping language calling for marijuana regulation. It's got three years left until the century mark to get it completely right.

President Obama has vowed to slash discretionary federal spending, but it isn't going be done on the back of the drug war. Federal drug control spending is up 3.5% in his Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Mostly it's the same old, same old drug war, but there are some interesting surprises.

A Missouri Senate committee with more moralistic wrath toward the poor than common sense has passed a bill that would require welfare applicants and recipients to be drug tested under "reasonable suspicion" and thrown off the rolls for three years if they test positive -- even though the legislature's own analysts say the bill would cost far more than it would save.

The South Pacific breezes could grow balmier, the mai-tais yummier, and tourists' dispositions sunnier, if a leading Tahiti political figure gets his way.

Sen. Jim Webb's (D-VA) National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee. If enacted, it would provide for the first comprehensive review of criminal justice policies in decades.

The Washington state marijuana decrim and legalization bills were killed in committee this week. That means it will be up to the voters to legalize pot in November through an initiative -- if organizers can come up with enough signatures in time.

Another legislative season begins across the land, and with it comes another crop of bills demanding drug testing of people receiving public benefits, from unemployment to food stamps to state medical assistance. They're expensive, they're impractical, and they're most likely unconstitutional, but that doesn't stop drug war demagogues from promoting them.

The cops lined up against it -- literally! -- but that didn't stop the California Assembly's Public Safety Committee from voting to approve a marijuana legalization bill. And so, history is made this week in Sacramento.