The group met at a Waldo's convenience store in Mexico City early one Sunday morning, following the instructions given over encrypted messages weeks before. When they were picked up by a vehicle, as arranged, they had no idea where they were going next.

Eventually they arrived at house in the southern barrio of Xochimilco furnished with little more than white plastic chairs and a projector. In the kitchen they found a blender, a whisk, pots, gloves, towels, paper napkins, peroxide, and oils.

This was what they had come for — to learn how to make marijuana-based treatments for cancer and epilepsy.

Speaking at a United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs, being held in New York from April 19-21, Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto said Tuesday that he supported the legalization of marijuana for medical and scientific purposes, as well as increasing the amount of cannabis that can be legally possessed for personal consumption.

Speaking at the special session — a gathering of world leaders to discuss, for the first time in two decades, the strategy for the war on drugs — the Mexican president reportedly said that drug users should not be criminalized, and that drug use should be treated as a “public health problem.”

“This region has been at the forefront of the reform process.” That’s what Alejandro Hope had to say about shifts toward more progressive drug policies in the Americas in recent years. Hope, a drug policy analyst and security editor at the Mexico City-based news site El Daily Post, spoke with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis about what the region’s policy changes mean on a global scale as the UN prepares to host a special summit, known as UNGASS 2016, on the worldwide drug problem from April 19 to 21.

"The hawks are no longer in this hemisphere."

Why do we call marijuana marijuana? Growing up, I assumed that "marijuana" was the original Latin name for the plant I discuss every week in this column. But that's not the case.

Cannabis is its actual name. Cannabis is the genus that contains the three psychoactive plants we love so well: Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and their stubby cousin Cannabis ruderalis. However, cannabis is far more commonly referred to as marijuana. Why?

The legalization of marijuana in the state of Colorado has not only been good for the local economy, but it has inadvertently helped fuel the business of Mexican drug cartels. 

"If you combine the legalization of marijuana and you combine that there are no regulations for the legalization of marijuana outside Colorado, it becomes an attractive criminal enterprises," said Jorge Duque with the Colorado Department of Law.

Duque said cartels are now trading drugs like heroin for marijuana, and the trade has since opened the door to drug and human trafficking.

“We have lots of victims. People are victimized whether they are being forced into prostitution, whether they are being kidnapped or just becoming addicts to illegal drug,” said Duque.

While a 1986 law allowed for the manufacture, export, sale and medical and scientific use of marijuana, the practice was, until Tuesday, never formally regulated.Current law already allows possession of up to 20 grams of marijuana or cultivation of up to 20 marijuana plants for personal use.

Colombia joins countries from Mexico to Chile for legalization on marijuana

With the new rules, Colombia joins countries from Mexico to Chile that have experimented with legalization or decriminalization as part of a wave of changing attitudes toward drug use and policies to combat it in Latin America.The proponents of medical marijuana claim that up to 400,000 Colombian citizens can use cannabis products to treat symptoms of epilepsy and other illnesses.

AS THE drug war has rumbled on, with little to show for all the money and violence, its critics have become a more diverse bunch than the hippies and libertarians who first backed drug reform. The latest broadside against prohibition was fired on March 24th by a group of former heads of state and businesspeople, who put forward a sober case for rethinking the international approach to drug control.

The war on drugs has failed, fuelling higher rates of infection and harming public health and human rights to such a degree that it's time to decriminalize non-violent minor drug offences, according to a new global report.

The authors of the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Public Health and International Drug Policy call for minor use, possession and petty use to be decriminalized following measurably worsened human health.

Americans have been hearing about Donald Trump's proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border since the businessman's presidential campaign began last summer. On Sunday, HBO's "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver tried to tear down that wall — or, at least the idea of building it in the first place.

Oliver devoted nearly twenty minutes of Sunday's episode to breaking down Trump's border wall proposal. The comedian concluded that the wall, which has become one of the key points of the Republican presidential front-runner's campaign platform, is probably not a very good idea. 

Across the Americas, the model of prohibition has fuelled inequality, bloodshed, and the mass violation of human rights. We need to understand why it has failed.