Global Ganja Report

Did you ever want to trip out for the benefit of science? That's what a lucky group of religious clerics got to do, and researchers are now in the process of evaluating the results. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore signed up more than 20 spiritual leaders from various denominations after issuing a call for volunteers last year. Following an initial screening process, the participants were given strong doses of psilocybin—the psychoactive chemical in magic mushroom.

The Rohingya Muslim people of Burma are facing what some have called genocide in their homeland, long denied citizenship rights and now under attack by both the official security forces and Buddhist-chauvinist militias, who have carried out massacres and burned down their villages. Some 500,000 Rohingya have fled across the border to Bangladesh—where they are not being welcomed. Already confined to squalid refugee camps near the Burmese border, they now face forcible relocation to an uninhabited offshore island. Shunted from one region to another, they are targeted by the predictable propaganda—Burmese authorities have stigmatized them as Muslim terrorists, and now Bangladesh authorities increasingly stigmatize them as drug-traffickers.

An estimated 7,000 protesters marched on the Philippines' House of Representatives in the Batasan district of Manila July 24 as ultra-hardline President Rodrigo Duterte gave his second State of the Nation Address—in which he pledged to keep pursuing his bloody drug war. "The fight will not stop," said Duterte. "There is a jungle out there. There are beasts and vultures preying on the helpless. We will not be disheartened, we will not be cowed, we will not be overhelmed." He offered drug dealers and users a choice of "jail or hell."

Attorney General Jeff Sessions signed an order July 19 reversing limits on the federal civil asset forfeiture program that were instated under the Obama administration in 2015. The widely criticized civil forfeiture program allows law enforcement to seize cash and property from citizens who have not been charged with any crime. But under the Obama-era change, the feds respected the right of states to rein in the practice. With Sessions' change, that is now undone.

Although rarely in the news, the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan is a critical corridor for hashish and opiates bound from southern neighbor Afghanistan to Europe and world markets. Violence associated with the cross-border trade is predictably endemic and appears to be escalating. Border guards have repeatedly clashed with traffickers on the frontier in recent weeks, leaving several dead.

The first decisive step toward the liberalized atmosphere for cannabis across much of the country was quite arguably San Francisco's Proposition P of 1991—the popular initiative that protected medical marijuana use in the city. So it's heartwarming that the City by the Bay has just established an Office of Cannabis to oversee legal sales. 

In unsettling news for the country's peace process with the FARC guerillas, Colombia registered a record-shattering 50% increase in coca-leaf cultivation last year, according to the latest report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The figures, released by UNODC's Integrated Illicit Crops Monitoring System (SIMCI) and reported by Bogotá daily El Tiempo July 14, show 146.000 hectares under coca cultivation in 2016, compared to 96.000 in 2015—actually a 52% jump.

The Republic of Ireland's long-promised medical marijuana law is being held up in the country's parliament, the Dáil—leading patients who have been waiting for legal herbal treatment in their own country to charge "betrayal." That was the exact word used by Irish mom Vera Twomey, speaking from the Netherlands, where she was seeking cannabis care for her daughter Ava, 9, an epilepsy sufferer. "What issue is more important than people all over the country in chronic pain?" she rhetorically asked Ireland's national broadcaster RTÉ, according to the Irish Times of July 13.