Global Ganja Report

During last year's Prop 19 fight in California, we noted the strange phenomenon of "Stoners Against Legalization"—tokers who opposed the legalization measure, sometimes spouting bizarre conspiracy theories that the ballot initiative was all a plot by Monsanto and other big corporations to corner the cannabis market and squeeze out independent growers with bio-engineered patented varieties. We noted that even if Prop 19 passed, "cannabis will remain illegal at the federal level, allowing Monsanto to be shut down if they dabble in the Evil Weed." But now it emerges that—surprise, surprise!—the feds have actually been giving multi-national corporations the legal right to grow cannabis that us commoners are denied.

California's Fresno County has banned outdoor medical marijuana growing following the case of Phayvanh Dydouanghphan, who shot to death an intruder who tried to steal his crop. Dydouangphan, a licensed medical grower, was sentenced to life in prison for the crime, AP informs us May 16. County Judge Arlan Harrell, imposing the sentence, said that Dydouangphan "apparently valued his pot more than human life," in AP's paraphrase. A story from Sept. 8 of last year on Fresno's KFSN provides more details on the case:

This is pretty funny, given that the Taliban stone people to death for getting stoned. But it really appears that Osama bin Laden liked to get bombed as well as to bomb others. Hopefully, this will expose the jihadi fundamentalists as a bunch of hypocrites—like most puritans. From New York magazine's Daily Intel blog:

Veteran Yippie activist and cannabis crusader Ben Masel died April 27 at his home in Madison, Wisc. He had been suffering from terminal lung cancer. Known for founding the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival, the Bronx-born Masel moved to Madison in 1971 and was a fixture in politics there ever since. He frequently ran for public office—including sheriff of Dane County—on a pro-legalization platform, and sometimes on the Republican ticket, just to tweak the local GOP establishment.

Evan Mills, an analyst at the US Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Labs in California, recently completed a study entitled "Energy Up in Smoke: The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production"—seeking to quantify the previously undocumented energy demand of the domestic marijuana industry.

Mainstream media had a field day with the publication in the British Medical Journal of a 10-year study by Dutch researchers finding that people who use cannabis in their youth dramatically increase their risk of psychotic symptoms, and that continued use can raise the risk of developing a psychotic disorder in later life. Researchers led by Jim van Os from Maastricht University studied a random sample of 1,923 adolescents and young adults aged 14 to 24 years.

Conspiracy crank Kurt Nimmo on the perennially loopy InfoWars.com turns to California's Proposition 19 for his latest fanstay fodder, picking up on a pipedream already spun by "Stoners Against Legalization." It goes something like this: Gazillionaire investor George Soros, an underwriter of 1996's Proposition 215 (as well as pro-democracy movements throughout the post-communist world), made a last-minute $1 million donation to the pro-19 campaign. It turns out he is also a big investor in the evil biotech giant Monsanto (and lots of other things, God knows). Therefore, Prop 19 is all a scam to allow Monsanto to develop GMO "terminator cannabis," wipe out home-growers and dominate the market with patented "non-active" varieties!

The RAND Corporation has released a new study entitled "Reducing Drug Trafficking Revenues and Violence in Mexico: Would Legalizing Marijuana in California Help?" The headline for the Oct. 12 press release reads: "Legalizing Marijuana in California Will Not Dramatically Reduce Mexican Drug Trafficking Revenues." It states: "The study calculates that Mexican drug trafficking organizations generate only $1 billion to $2 billion annually from exporting marijuana to the United States and selling it to wholesalers, far below existing estimates by the government and other groups." It says the study also refutes the often-cited claim that marijuana accounts for 60% of gross drug export revenues of Mexican drug trafficking organizations, and notes that Proposition 19 would affect only one state in any case. But Jon Walker of the pro-legalization blog Just Say Now actually read the text of the study itself, and found some contrary findings: