The Washington Post attributed the gradual mainstreaming and acceptance of cannabis, in part, to baby boomers reaching retirement.

The American Medical Association took a belated, timid, but nonetheless significant step toward recognizing the medicinal value of cannabis.

L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley was among the few who urged city council to reject an ordinance that would recognize and regulate compliant dispensaries.

When addicts are able to get heroin by prescription, the purity is constant and known, but on the black market under drugs prohibition, the purity and potency of heroin varies wildly, with predictably fatal results. In the British Columbia city of Abbotsford, a spate of heroin overdoses last week led addicts to organize, in an attempt to actually work with police to warn others of the potent heroin.

In the Australian state of Victoria, a drugs scandal was brewing last week involving women's prisons, where powerful (and prohibited) drugs like heroin are available to inmates, who are overdosing in prison.

In the U.K. many scientists are coming to the conclusion that - for drugs policy at least - government isn't interested in hearing scientific advice if it doesn't bolster prohibition. In the wake of the firing of former U.K. drugs tsar Prof David Nutt last month for disagreeing with aspects of cannabis prohibition, 28 senior scientists called for clearly specified principles "for the treatment of independent scientific advice".

And finally this week, Johann Hari, writes this week in the Independent newspaper in the U.K. the prohibition of drugs is "a faith - and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness to the evidence... The prohibitionists are therefore left a contradiction between their message and the facts. They can either change their message, or try to suppress the facts. Last week, the British Government made its choice."