Drug conviction mars recovering addict's rental application

OTTAWA — The personal use of illicit drugs, from heroin to crack cocaine, should be decriminalized as part of a federal-provincial strategy to tackle drug abuse, a B.C.-based national coalition of drug policy experts argue in a report to be released Thursday. The report denounces the Harper government’s aggressive war on drugs that has put the emphasis on law enforcement while steering money away from harm-reduction initiatives like Vancouver’s supervised injection site.

Now that a holiday weekend has passed with barely a word from the mayor of Canada’s largest city on allegations that he has been caught on video smoking crack, Toronto’s political future seems eerily uncertain. Something has to give, but in this moment of uncertainty, it is not clear whether that will be a libel suit, a fulsome denial, an explanation, a police investigation, a council vote, or a crowd-sourced fundraising effort to buy the alleged video and make it public.

A pair of veteran Miami narcotics detectives testified in federal court Friday against their former supervisor, accusing Sgt. Raul Iglesias of scheming to plant cocaine on a suspect and once carrying what appeared to be a bag of crack in his personal bag.

Alcohol is more harmful than illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine, a new study by British researchers said Monday.Scientists looked at the dangers to both the individual and to wider society and found that alcohol was the most dangerous substance, according to the study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD).The results fly in the face of long-held opinions about which drugs pose the greatest dangers, with the authors claiming they demonstrate "the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm."

The house where Mayor Rob Ford took a photograph with gunshot victim Anthony Smith has now been identified, and is just steps from the apartment building where sources say the alleged crack video might have been stored.

A Mormon mother from Arizona is being held in a Mexican prison on bogus drug smuggling charges, her family tells Fox News.

James Harmon, a Manhattan landlord on West 76th Street near Central Park is taking his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court based on his claims that New York City’s rent laws constitute a “taking” of his property without just compensation, and violate his constitutional rights.