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The Oregon Supreme Court heard an hour of arguments in the case of Sheriff Mike Winters v. Cynthia Willis. In 2008, Willis was denied a concealed handgun license because she is a medical marijuana cardholder.

Police have tied the October beheading of a man in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler to a Mexican drug trafficking organization. "They stabbed him, we believe to death, and then severed his head. There was a lot of blood," Chandler police Sgt. Joe Favazzo said.

Residents have closed more than 2,000 streets in Ciudad Juarez, the city in Mexico most affected by drug prohibition violence. About 200 families have been wiped out in 10 zones heavily affected by the drug prohibition war.

Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, opines that public officials and drug lords are the biggest beneficiaries of the drug war. He says what police don’t realize (or maybe some of them do) is that the only way to shut down the drug lords, immediately, is to end the drug war by legalizing drugs. Continuing to wage the drug war only ensures that the drug lords will continue supplying drugs and that the cops will continue making busts, and that both groups will continue making beaucoup bucks off the war, which is really what the drug war is all about.

Washington senators moved forward with establishing more regulation on the state's medical marijuana system, approving a bill with changes that would give patients greater protection from arrest and bring the supply chain out of a legal gray area. After lengthy debate, senators approved the bill on a 29-20 vote. The measure now moves to the House.

Drug prohibition is responsible for a phenomenal amount of government corruption across the globe. Retired-general Rene Sanabria, the former head of Bolivia's main anti-narcotics unit serving as a top intelligence adviser to the country's Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti, pled not guilty in a Miami federal court on charges of conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., in a scandal that has rocked the government of Evo Morales. Felipe Caceres, Bolivia's top antidrug official said Mr. Sanabria's security unit "was riddled" with corruption, and that 15 other police officials were in the process of being detained for complicity in the drug-smuggling operation.

A new poll shows that 57 percent of Floridians support legalization of medical marijuana as buzz grows that the issue could be placed on the ballot as soon as 2012. The poll was conducted by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican firm that worked with Rick Scott's gubernatorial campaign.

President Felipe Calderón will meet in Washington tomorrow with President Barack Obama in an attempt to repair relations at a time when spiraling drug prohibition violence in Mexico has frayed ties between the two allies. Mr. Calderón's visit, announced last week, also comes after a spate of ill-timed comments by U.S. officials about Mexico's drug prohibition violence. Among them are that Mexican drug trafficking organizations could be allied with Islamic terrorists and that drug traffickers could overthrow the Mexican state, forcing the U.S. to send troops. Such statements have enraged Mexican officials, who are notoriously sensitive to any suggestion of U.S. interference in national affairs. "I don't recall this kind of bad blood in a long time," said Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister.

Barry Considine, a writer and polio survivor who advocates for (and uses) medical marijuana, opines that it is time to allow patients in Maryland to use marijuana for medicinal purposes without fear of arrest and prosecution under Maryland law. He says we must move forward based on the best anecdotal evidence that is available as the DEA and National Institute on Drug Abuse have consistently blocked the efforts of researchers and scientists to study medical marijuana and provide empirical evidence of its efficacy.

Jim Waters, vice president of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, opines that, unable to secure the votes to pass the original proposal, which makes cold, allergy and sinus products containing pseudoephedrine controlled substances requiring a prescription for purchase, supporters of Kentucky's Senate Bill 45 are now floating what they label a compromise: exempt gel caps. Waters says this new tactic by logically challenged politicians reveals the same intellectual denseness demonstrated all along in this fight. He says that this will do nothing to curb meth production in Kentucky, and that it could even do less by giving citizens a false sense of security that something effective was being done to stop the meth problem.

A group called Legalize Louisiana is leading statewide marches seeking to change Louisiana laws and legalize marijuana.

Benny Avni opines that Felipe Calderon's war on the drug trafficking organizations created by prohibition is costing a lot in American money and Mexican blood -- and he's losing. Avni says the ultimate solution is legalization, which would lower profits and take violence out of the drug trade -- just as the end of Prohibition reduced America's gang problem. But, instead, Washington muddles on with an expensive and extremely deadly conceit -- pretending that all we need to do is pour some money on the problem, and Mexico's federal government will somehow eventually prevail.