Kristen Gwynne, The Influence

This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

Virginia cops and prosecutors in four counties are using a bizarre legal code to secretly blacklist and outright ban residents deemed “habitual drunkards” from purchasing alcohol, a Daily Beast report on a class-action lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Justice Center claims. The penalties can range from huge fines to jail time.

In 2012,  the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico called for a United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs, scheduled for 2019, to be reassigned an earlier date, given the crisis of drug trafficking and related violence in Latin America. As the session’s April 2016 date approaches, drug policy reform groups across the globe areorganizing to educate and influence world leaders on the advantages of ending the criminalization of people who use drugs. Most recently, civil society groups condemned the UN for failing to acknowledge and work to resolve “the devastating consequences of punitive and repressive drug policies.”

Thanks to a string of name-checks by pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Madonna and Kanye West, as well as several tragic deaths at music festivals, ”molly”—aka MDMA—has rarely been far from the headlines in recent years.

This week is Super Tuesday, the biggest event of the 2016 presidential primary elections, with 13 states and one territory voting on which candidates to send to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Large-scale losers will stand little chance of progressing, given the breadth of demographics and cultures that these states represent. This year, the burning issues of opioid overdose and marijuana legalization have forced presidential candidates to repeatedly comment, however foolishly, on drug policy—something they typically prefer to avoid.