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Patients, doctors and dispensaries seeking legal help navigating Arizona's new medical marijuana law could find themselves up the creek without a lawyer. The ethics counsel for the State Bar of Arizona said it is a violation of the rules laid out by the Arizona Supreme Court for attorneys to help clients break federal laws prohibiting selling or possessing marijuana.

Two attorneys say they'll take an Iowa case before the nation's highest court next week that could alter how federal judges sentence convicts after appeals. The issue is if judges can weigh a convict's efforts at rehabilitation while an appeal is pending.

America's most renowned bastion of illicit marijuana growing is threatened by cavernous, city-taxed cultivation warehouses soon to be licensed in Oakland. It is alarmed by cities from La Puente to Berkeley to Sacramento that approved taxes on dispensaries or endorsed medical marijuana cultivation, sanctioning a marijuana economy wider and more competitive than ever. Humboldt seeks to save itself by going legit -- the new Humboldt Growers Association is working for county approval to license and tax outdoor pot plantations of up to 40,000 square feet.

Virginia Delegate Harvey Morgan has proposed a bill to decriminalize marijuana possession in the upcoming General Assembly session. HB 1443 would replace criminal penalties for simple possession with a civil fine of $500. Morgan is a Republican and, more important, an assistant clinical professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical school.

Drug prohibition violence has painted Monterrey with the look and feel of the gritty border 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the north. This wasn't supposed to happen in Mexico's modern northern city with gleaming glass towers that rise against the Sierra Madre, where students flock to world-class universities, including the country's equivalent of MIT. The deterioration happened nearly overnight, laying bare issues that plague the entire country and speak to the nature of drug prohibition.

Yosmireli and Griselda, two and four years old, died by bullets to their heads from soldiers' guns -- their mother, aunt and seven-year-old brother Joniel were also killed, on a rural road in northwest Mexico. The killings became the first known case of civilians gunned down by soldiers in the prohibitionist war on drug traffickers declared by the government of conservative Felipe Calderón, which tipped the country into a spiral of violence. One very clear effect is "the invisibility of violence against women...If a girl is found dead on the street and the body shows signs of violence, whether she has a bullet wound, is tied up, or there is a dead man next to her, her death is recorded in the category of 'organized crime'...By recording the cases in the catch-all category of organized crime, the victims' families no longer have access to the case file and cannot pressure the authorities to solve the crime," said David Peña of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.