This week’s best city stories from around the web talk about marijuana zones in California, a forgotten waterway under the streets of Auckland, a mushroom farm in Camden and mime-artist-assisted traffic control in Bogotá. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories, and any others you’ve read recently, both on Guardian Cities and elsewhere. Just share your thoughts in the comments below.

Pot city

COLUMBIA — A Vietnam war veteran and former Commander of the Missouri Veterans of Foreign Wars will be speaking on Monday evening in support of medical marijuana.

Tom Mundell will speak at 7 p.m. in the Columbia Public Library, according to a news release from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Mundell has met with President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C., to discuss the re-scheduling of marijuana multiple times and the benefits he experienced and observed in connection with marijuana, according to NORML.

The Missouri General Assembly legalized limited use of cannabidiol for the treatment of "intractable epilepsy" in 2014, according to the release. Cannabidiol, a compund in marijuana, has medical effects but doesn't produce a high.

(Bloomberg) -- Farmers deep in a drug-producing region in the Andes Mountains in southwest Colombia have been badly hit by fighting between the government and Marxist rebels. One might, therefore, expect them to be hopeful that a peace deal to end the conflict would improve their lives. Instead, they are worried. Bloomberg’s Matthew Bristow reports (Source: Bloomberg) (Corrects spelling of Cauca in video.)

Deep in the Andes mountains in southwest Colombia, where Marxist rebels have ruled for decades, school children are issued white flags for evacuation during firefights that break out with the army.

Note the wide disparity of drug prices across the countries surveyed.

With the recent turn of economic events in Greece and China, it has become ever more apparent that we live in increasingly globalized world in which economies are inextricably linked.

This begged the question; are national drug economies linked in a similar manner?

In this informative video, BuzzFeed shows you how much coffee, cannabis, cigarettes, cocaine, whiskey, and heroin can you buy for $20 U.S. dollars around the world.

About 20% of marijuana business owners in the U.S. are women

Suburban moms selling marijuana is no longer just the plotline of the Showtime series “Weeds”. It’s a growing reality.

Women are increasingly entering the marijuana market as business owners and customers, as the legal obstacles are gradually cleared and retail spaces grow in number.

Women Grow, a Denver-based industry network for women in the cannabis market, estimates that about 20% of marijuana business owners in the U.S. are female. (Women-owned companies comprise about 30% of all U.S. businesses, but as the majority are nonprofit, they account for just 4% of overall business revenue, according to a 2014 report by the National Association of Women Business Owners.)

On June 12, crew members of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Vigilant offloaded 3,100 pounds of marijuana seized from a go-fast boat intercepted in the Caribbean Sea.

The story on how Coast Guard personnel seized the marijuana in late May in waters between Panama and the Colombian island of San Andrés emerged last week in Miami federal court records.

According to a criminal complaint filed by a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the action unfolded May 27 when a go-fast vessel was spotted traveling in international waters about 100 miles south of San Andrés Island, a Colombian possession east of Nicaragua and north of Panama.

Celebrated crime writer Don Winslow continues his secret history of the War on Drugs in his disturbing and important new novel, 'The Cartel'

Coke is dying out, while weed is innovating

Thanks to innovation, illegal marijuana users are getting a stronger—and possibly more harmful—high today than they did 10 years ago.

The potency of cannabis, commonly measured by concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, has steadily increased over the past decade in the U.S. and Europe, the two major marijuana markets, according to the annual World Drugs Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime.

Back when Juan Pablo Guzman started his cannabis cultivation business nearly two decades ago, the Colombian says he had to get permission from the country’s FARC rebels, the military and the police to bring his crops down from a small, 2-hectare plot up in the subtropical forests in the department of Cauca. But Guzman doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker. Over the past decade, the 48-year-old balding man, who’s full of charm and speaks with a springy cadence, has transitioned to making medicinal products out of marijuana to help people in pain. “This,” he says as he pulls out a vial and drips a black, viscous glob on his finger, “is my medicine.”