Global Ganja Report

"Country Joe” McDonald of the band Country Joe & the Fish, immortalized as an icon of the 1960s counterculture through his proudly subversive performance at the Woodstock festival, died March 7 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 84. In the defining moment of his career, he led a crowd of nearly half a million at the 1969 Upstate New York mega-concert in the "Fish Cheer" (spelling out the word FUCK) before launching into his satirical anti-war anthem "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin'-to-Die Rag."

The year 2020's record-breaking wildfires in California and other Western states have compounded the grim impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—and have similarly been politicized. Thus far, the blow they have dealt to the burgeoning cannabis industry has been well weathered. But this will clearly pose a growing challenge in the years to come—as those parts of the country where legal cannabis cultivation is most advanced are also the most vulnerable to this devastating sign of ecological disequilibrium.

In the near future, the CBD, THC or other cannabinoids you consume in edibles or medications may not be derived from cannabis at all, but grown in a laboratory.

Kevin Chen, CEO and co-founder of Hyasynth Bio, describes the Montreal-based start-up as "focused on engineering strains of yeast to produce the active compounds of cannabis without having to grow plants."

Protests have spread across the country in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police—a haunting crystallization of institutionalized racism in law enforcement. The protests have been punctuated by looting in many cities, and cannabis businesses have not been spared. How the industry reacts at this moment will reveal much about the soul of America's cannabis community.

If there is one person with a claim to reviving the pharmacopoeia of cannabis in the post-prohibition age—and thereby undermining prohibition's pseudo-scientific foundations—that person was Tod Mikuriya. The Berkeley psychiatrist, who died in 2007, was hailed as the grandfather of the medical marijuana movement, backing up the activists with unimpeachable scholarly chops—to the rage of the Drug War establishment.

A verdict against glyphosate producer Monsanto in a case brought by a cancer sufferer has brought world attention to the dangers of pesticides and herbicides. This is a question with implications already felt in the cannabis industry—both legal and illegal.

A figure from the Bay Area cannabis industry was embroiled in America's fast-escalating culture wars when she threatened to call the police on a young Black girl selling water on a San Francisco street. In the outcry, she has stepped down from her own company—and helped draw a line over what behavior is considered acceptable in the cannabis community.

For a generation now, science has known of two cannabinoid receptors—specialized protein molecules that interact with the active compounds in the cannabis plant for the human body. These are CB1 and CB2, both discovered in the early '90s. Now there is growing awareness of a third such receptor that was identified in 2007. This receptor, GPR55, may be key to understanding a wide spectrum of therapeutic applications for cannabinoids—and especially the non-psychoactive cannabidiol, or CBD.