Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal, the second-highest ranking civilian official in the U.S. Army, described the situation in Mexico created by drug prohibition as an insurgency and fretted over a scenario in which armed U.S. soldiers could be called to the border and/or into Mexico. Westphal is the most senior U.S. official to publicly compare Mexico’s drug cartels to an insurgency since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a similar assessment last September. Westfall — who said he was expressing a personal opinion, but one he had shared with the White House — said he didn’t want to ever see a situation in which "armed and fighting" American soldiers are sent to combat an insurgency "on our border, in violation of our Constitution, or to have to send them across the border."

The saga of a Colorado Springs, Colorado teenager struggling with a rare neurological condition best controlled with medical marijuana lozenges became a little more surreal when school officials informed the student’s father that the child cannot return to school on any day that he consumes medical marijuana. The child missed most of the last school year when he was diagnosed with diaphragmatic and axial myoclonus, which causes seizures that can last for 24 hours or more. He spent extensive periods of time hospitalized and used morphine and other narcotics to control the seizures until doctors discovered that THC works better than any other medication.

In San Francisco, a medical marijuana collective is trying to change the idea of a medical marijuana club as a tiny storefront office in a declining part of town, or a huge but impersonal former warehouse.

A large group of doctors, HIV researchers and other public health officials has just released a letter lambasting the Canadian government’s bill S-10, which would overhaul illicit drug laws. The principle target of the 564 signatories – which includes doctors, nurses, social workers and law professors – is a provision that would impose minimum prison sentences of at least six months for a variety of drug offenses, including operating small-scale marijuana grow operations.