Global Ganja Report

California's ArcView Market Research and its affiliated BDS Analytics have released a "2019 Update" to the 6th edition of their report on The State of Legal Marijuana Markets, which was published back in June. The Update takes stock of events in the second half of the year, and anticipates that worldwide spending on legal cannabis will grow 39.1% to $17 billion in 2019.

Among the current crowded field of Democratic hopefuls for the 2020 presidential race, at least a handful have progressive positions on cannabis. Among these, the most outspoken on the question has probably been Hawaii's Tulsi Gabbard—who, unfortunately, has deeply problematic stances on some other very critical issues.

In what is starting to smell like an anti-cannabis media campaign, headlines erupt this week on the possible deleterious effects of cannabis on the developing brains of young teens. Again, the accounts are one-sided—and the political assumptions behind them flawed.

Recent days have seen successive stories in the media on the supposed mental health hazards of cannabis—seeming to signal a backlash to recent gains in normalizing the plant and overcoming the stigma.

In a strange paradox, Turkey's increasingly authoritarian President Erdogan has announced that he wants to expand legal cannabis cultivation in the country. His speech unveiling the proposal even portrayed the plant's prohibition as imposed by Western powers to undermine Turkish agriculture—appealing to his traditional Islamist base, with otherwise conservative instincts.

A Chinese delegation to Israel to explore cooperation in the cannabis sector points to the East Asian giant's growing footprint in the global industry. But in a continued contradiction, the People's Republic has possibly the harshest drug laws on Earth—and, where unsanctioned use by the commoners is concerned, cannabis is no exception.

The claim that cannabis causes "mental illness" rears its dubious head like clockwork every few years, and this latest round has occasioned a virtual media frenzy—a seeming backlash to the recent advances in normalization of the herb and its aficionados. Scratching the claims, however, reveals more hype than rigor.

The headlines are all too familiar ones, but this time they got very prominent play.

In his new memoir True Stories: Tales from the Generation of a New World Culture, Garrick Beck spans a personal journey through radical bohemia in the 1950s, hippie utopianism in the 1960s, back-to-the-land communalism in the 1970s, to applying those ethics today through community work and urban land-reclamation back in the New York City of his youth.

He was born into artistic activism as the offspring of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the leading figures of the Living Theatre.

Terpenes, the chemical compounds that give your herb its distinctive smell and flavor, are increasingly recognized as a vital part of the overall cannabis experience. But with the growing popularity of vape pens and concentrates, industry is now adding terpenes to products in an effort to recreate that whole-flower feel. These may come from plants other than cannabis—and some may even be synthetic.