Longtime marijuana activist Dana Larsen announced his bid for the leadership of the provincial party from the Vancouver office where he dispenses medical marijuana. The 39-year-old is the first candidate to publicly announce his intention to take over the party since Carole James resigned on Dec. 6. James has said she will remain at the helm until an interim leader is chosen in mid-January. Larson, the founding editor of Cannabis Culture Magazine from 1994 to 2004, says he has support from many members of the provincial NDP party, but admits he isn't in the "inner circle."

Four years and 50,000 troops into President Felipe Calderon's drug prohibition war, the fighting has exposed severe limitations in the Mexican army's ability to wage unconventional warfare, tarnished its proud reputation and left the U.S. pointedly criticizing the force as "virtually blind" on the ground. A series of secret diplomatic cables leaked recently revealed the United States' profound unease over Mexico's efforts, despite public assurances to the contrary, with stinging language criticizing the army as stymied by well-protected fugitive drug lords. U.S. diplomats and Mexican intelligence officials say the Mexican military and police distrust each other, refuse to share intelligence and resist operating together, squandering important potential gains.

80-year-old Republican Delegate Harvey Morgan, also an assistant clinical professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University, is leading the charge to decriminalize marijuana possession. Legislation proposed by Morgan, known as House Bill 1443, would replace the criminal fine for possession with a civil penalty and eliminate the 30-day jail sentence and criminal record that would follow conviction. "In 2007, nearly 18,000 people were arrested in Virginia for simple possession of marijuana...This places a tremendous burden on law enforcement, prisons and the judicial system. In these times of economic hardship, we need to closely examine how our tax dollars are spent," Morgan said.

A dozen unidentified gunmen set Erika Gandara’s home ablaze on and torched two cars parked outside before abducting her. She joined the police force in 2009, when there were 12 agents on the force with her. As rampant drug prohibition violence spiraled, Ms. Gandara began to lose her colleagues, one after the next.

Evan Wood, director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS; an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at UBC; and founder of the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, opines on the role marijuana prohibition plays in producing gang violence.

Joseph Proctor told his girlfriend he was popping out to the convenience store in the quiet Mexican beach town where the couple had just moved, intending to start a new life. The next morning, the 32-year-old New York native was dead inside his crashed van on a road outside Acapulco. It is at least the third case this year in which soldiers, locked in a prohibitionist drug war with trafficking organizations, have been accused of killing innocent civilians and faking evidence in cover-ups. Such scandals are driving calls for civilian investigators to take over cases that are almost exclusively handled by military prosecutors and judges who rarely convict one of their own.