What Dolt Hatched This Egg? The U.S. is funding an initiative to replace Afghanistan’s opium plantations—where most of the world's lucrative opium crops are grown—with pomegranate orchards. This pomegranate fad is surely on the wane. I think we’ve all maxed out on pomegranate juice, pomegranate mimosas, pomegranate martinis, pomegranate soda… they must be going the way of wheat bran smoothies. The popularity of opium, on the other hand, appears to have some staying power.

People Still Suck: Teenager kills himself by overdosing on a web cam while douche-bag viewers goad him on.

If We Only Could Remember to Smoke It Every Day: Scientists find that marijuana helps keep memory sharp by reducing brain inflammation and stimulating new cell growth.

We Should Win an Award for Fucking Up Another Country This Bad: If you recall Plan Colombia, you may remember that we sent billions in “aid” to stop the production of cocaine by eradicating coca plants. Instead—determined to sell their product to the most demanding cocaine market in the world (that would be us)—farmers grew more coca in the mountains, cartels grew more powerful in the cities, and the cocaine supply swelled in America. Nice work, U.S. So we switched strategies to Plan Mexico, which attempts to stop cartels from delivering the cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. by intercepting their shipments and dismantling the cartels. But now Mexico is a bathtub of piranhas. The death toll so far this year: 4,300, double that of last year. The amount of money their drug czar allegedly accepted in cartel bribes: $450,000. The place where cartels are sending their assassins: hospital rooms.

Dear People Who Set Drug Policies: Farmers will farm, smugglers will smuggle, and dealers will deal drugs—and kill anyone they have to—to deliver their commodity to the most lucrative drug market in the world. That's how capitalism works.

This Is What Hypocrisy Looks Like: The same month that the California prison guards' union spent millions of dollars to defeat an initiative that would have replaced prison terms with treatment for drug offenders, the union led a lawsuit against the state to reduce prison crowding. The union says current conditions create "a dehumanizing effect on correctional staff."

Inmates with open, bleeding wounds routinely use communal showers and suicidal prisoners are sometimes kept for hours inside small cages, witnesses testified in a lawsuit over state prison crowding.

California's 33 adult prisons are designed to hold about 100,000 inmates, but currently have more than 156,000.

About 35,000 inmates—or roughly 20 percent of the state’s prison population—are serving time for drug offenses. Judges haven’t yet made up their minds.