Something's rotten in Denver, and it's not the pungent stench of burnt cannabis filling the air. As Colorado's legal weed party barrels full tilt into its third year, the laws governing the state's medical and recreational marijuana businesses still haven't reckoned with the ugly racial disparities at their core.

The approach that Colorado, Alaska, and Washington have taken to legalizing marijuana can resemble the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show: a free-for-all that, while liberating, has produced only a hazy sense of where the party is going. Meanwhile, Vermont, contrary to its popular reputation for the free-wheeling life, is approaching the issue like the nerdy kid in an SAT prep course. Two years ago the state commissioned a massive RAND Corporation report on different approaches to legalization, and last year top state officials flew to Colorado to see for themselves how legalization has been working out in the Rocky Mountains.

Chief Medical officer Dr Patrick Martin said the legalisation of marijuana could have a positive effect on violent crime in St Kitts-Nevis.

"We have the evidence in health, in the security sector. In 2007 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime produced a report titled 'Crime and Violence in the Caribbean', and I quote, 'Drug trafficking is the cause of the gun-related homicide'.

"Where there are drugs there are guns. The gun culture is everywhere. Can we bring it to an end in St Kitts and Nevis? The answer is yes, we are 50,000 people," said Martin, who was speaking on a programme on WINN FM on Monday.

Despite news last year suggesting Brazil's Supreme Court would rule imminently on whether the country should decriminalize low-level possession and use of drugs, all seems to have gone quiet. What happened? 

In August 2015, we were among those who published such articles, noting how the Supreme Court were discussing decriminalization against the backdrop of a growing chorus of voices calling for drug law reform. After the first three of the Court's 11 justices voted in favor of decriminalization in September, all looked set to move forward. 

There is now a stronger arsenal available to those states working to bring down the scourge of marijuana prohibition in their neck of the woods. Earlier last week, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Pueblo County and a legion of Colorado officials in a lawsuit suggesting that marijuana legalization violated a number of statutes overseen by the thugs in the District of Columbia.

Although the case does not appear to have national implications, the outcome should provide some level of solace for other regions of the United States wishing to reform their pot laws without the risk of being litigiously accosted by a ministry of naysayers.

Colombia joined the group of Latin American countries to legalize the use of cannabis (marijuana) for medical and scientific purposes, after President Juan Manuel Santos signed on December 22 a decree regulating the cultivation, processing, import and export of cannabis to those objectives.

With this measure, the Colombian government finally seeks to regulate these activities, in addition to owning and controlling seed growing areas, provided medical and scientific purposes, which was allowed for decades but had no regulation. What it has not legalized is cannabis use on public roads and marketing.

A Utah church is suing the feds for seizing marijuana it mailed to a cancer patient, citing protections afforded by its Indian spirituality. But activists call the church a mockery.

An Oklevueha Native American Church medicine woman from Oregon mailed a 5-ounce package of pot—the sacrament of cannabis—to an ailing church member in Ohio on Dec. 10, 2015.

The package never made it. It was seized by law enforcement, as Joy Graves discovered when she used UPS’s online tracking option to track her package. Graves and the church, founded by James “Flaming Eagle” Mooney, turned around and sued for the company and the federal government for their weed and the right to ship it wherever they please, citing federal religious freedom laws as the basis.

Mexico launched its first national forum on the question of marijuana legalization Tuesday in the Caribbean city of Cancun, the first of five historic debates that could change the future of marijuana prohibition in the country.

“This is an issue that has directly or indirectly affected the lives of millions of Mexicans,” Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said at the forum, which was broadcast online in the name of broadening participation. “Such a delicate issue cannot be left to improvisation.”

The event touched on issues of public health and potential addiction with recreational marijuana use. The other four debates will tackle other themes related to personal pot consumption.

National Security Minister Peter Bunting says the police have arrested 14,000 fewer persons for possession of marijuana.

The announcement comes months after the government enacted changes to the Dangerous Drug Act which decriminalised possession of small quantities of marijuana.

He says the decrease in the number of arrests for drug possession means 14,000 fewer persons were consigned to the fringes of the economy.

Bunting pointed out that before the changes, persons criminalised for ganja possession could not get a United States visa, for example, or get a job.

As one of Vermont’s approximately 2,500 official medical marijuana patients, Robert Gwynn is excited his state lawmakers are considering legalizing cannabis. Born with neurofibromatosis type 1, a tumor disorder that has left him with debilitating nerve pain, limited appetite and ongoing fatigue, the 31-year-old has been part of the state’s medical marijuana program for the past two years. Medical marijuana, he says, has helped him halve his 14-pill-a-day pharmaceutical regimen, which had left him so mentally disconnected from reality he was afraid to drive. But he thinks a recreational market could encourage the sort of competition, proficiency and price constraints lacking in the state’s current system of four nonprofit dispensaries statewide.