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A recent ruling shows how easy it can be for a company that markets its services via a website to find itself a defendant in a United States federal court. In a trademark infringement case brought over competing claims to the “LifeAlert” trademark, a federal judge ruled on December 29, 2008, that the Canadian defendant…

The Senate Judiciary Committee has rejected Attorney General Mukasey’s call to advance legislation undoing the Sentencing Commission’s reform of federal sentencing guidelines around crack cocaine, the Los Angeles Times reports. Not only that, the LAT notes that Senator Patrick Leahy actually had the political cojones to call the AG’s tactics what they really are: fear-mongering….

Philip Morris will get another crack at reducing the punitive damages award in a long-running case brought by a cigarette smoker, as the Second District Court of Appeal found there had been improper rejection of the cigarette company’s proposed instruction on those damages. The case is Bullock v. Philip Morris, B164398. The original punitive damage…

Cigarette sales in Indiana have dropped almost 18 percent in the nine months following the imposition of a 44 cent-per-pack tax, the Chicago Tribune reports. To my mind, this fairly dramatic behavior modification based on a small economic tweak says some interesting things about our ability to control drug use through regulated markets as opposed…

British programmer Joshua Browder is helping people save  a lot of money on legal fees with his latest project – the world’s first robot lawyer. The 19-year-old developed a free service that allows users to ask any kind of legal question and receive relevant answers autogenerated by bots. Browder first started the project last summer…

Tests intended to determine whether the drug tenofovir can prevent HIV from entering the body have hit a wave of global opposition, the Washington Post reports. Trials in Cambodia, have all been cancelled because of protests. The interesting thing, as the article makes clear, is that the tests might very well have helped the individuals who…

Several months ago I posted an item asking for readers to give me the scoop on suboxone, a relatively new drug that is used to treat opioid dependence. A lot of people get to this blog because they Google the word suboxone, but I was not aware of any legal controversy around the drug. I…

Every day this blog gets hits from people interested in Suboxone, which is a drug made from buprenorphine and naloxone that is used to treat opioid dependence. It’s ridiculous in a way, because I’ve previously only posted *one* item on Suboxone and it was nothing but a link to a news story about the difficulties…

Another year is wrapping up and so it is once again time to consider the most interesting drug law stories of the last 365 days. Keep in mind that I’m a California oriented blogger and my interests have to do primarily with issues that are either in criminal law or in areas of our national…