Global Ganja Report

Panama's national legislature approved a medical marijuana law—a first for the nations of the Central American isthmus. Advocates in neighboring Costa Rica are taking heart, and redoubling efforts to make their country the next. But cultural conservatives are pledging resistance in both countries.

New York City's Happy Munkey "cannabis lifestyle purveyor" held two after-hours affairs this month at the East River waterfront venue hosting the popular Immersive Van Gogh exhibit. The twin soirées were seen as marking the arrival of an open presence for cannabis in the Big Apple's vaunted cultural life.

Having funded their long insurgency with opium and hashish, the Taliban are poised to establish a “narco-state” in Afghanistan. The multi-billion dollar 20-year US effort to suppress cultivation of illicit crops in the county failed as dramatically as its war against the Taliban. Exports of Taliban-tainted smack and hash are already reaching Europe, and may reach US shores.

A disturbing escalation is reported in California’s far-north Siskiyou County, where Hmong immigrants from Laos have been getting in on the cannabis economy—sparking a xenophobic backlash. Conservative politicians are making hay of the tensions, while the local Hmong are starting to stand up and protest.

Two years and counting after Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the country’s Congress to legalize cannabis, the high court justices ran out of patience with the legislative paralysis and issued a new ruling — this one removing penalties for personal use by judicial decree.

But there is no provision for commercial production, and the decree calls for tight federal regulation even of personal possession and cultivation. Will this move prove to be at least a beginning in the daunting challenge of ending Mexico’s long and bloody narco-nightmare?

Morocco, long the world's largest illicit producer, is finally getting a legalized commercial cannabis industry, thanks to a law actually introduced by the current otherwise conservative government. The new law is designed to daylight traditional small growers in the marginalized Rif Mountains.

But the program is geared toward the export market and explicitly bars "recreational" use. It remains to be seen whether there will be a meaningful relaxation of increasingly militarized cannabis enforcement.

The sex scandal investigation of Florida's far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz interlocks with a controversy concerning favoritism in handing out medical marijuana licenses in the Sunshine State. And one of the key beneficiaries appears to be Trulieve, now one of the leading cannabis companies in the United States. The origins of the firm go back to a nexus of prominent state Republicans, including names currently making stomach-churning national headlines.

As political and legal space opens for cannabis in state after state, the idea of caps on the potency — whether of flower, extracts or edibles — is gaining currency. But voices in the cannabis industry view this as a phobic response rooted in the flawed assumptions of prohibition.