Italy, which eliminated legal penalties for drug possession by referendum more than a decade ago, has now swung back the other way, though there seems to be some debate as to how far.

The story doesn’t seem to have penetrated the non-Italian mass media. I picked it up from The Drug Update, a news aggregator run by a group of UCLA students. It’s a new enterprise, and seems to be a high-quality one. If you want to keep track of what’s going on in both drug abuse policy and policy toward pharmaceuticals, think about adding The Drug Update to your bookmarks.