Global Ganja Report

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."

Gains are reported from Massachusetts in organized labor's push to unionize the cannabis industry. But significant obstacles remain—from management roadblocking, to the ambiguous status under national labor law of an industry dealing in a federally illegal substance.

Hemp’s Curious Cultural Trajectory

Now that hemp has finally arrived at its long-sought status as a legal crop and commodity, there is a sense of inevitability to its deviation from the utopian vision that animated the advocates who fought for it a generation ago.

A tension that has always existed between two currents in the subculture of hemp advocacy is increasingly weighted toward the more mundane—activists versus entrepreneurs, idealism versus pragmatism, agrarianism versus agribusiness. And finally the original paradigm of a crop with multitudinous uses as “food, fuel and fiber,” holding the potential to solve humanity’s ecological crisis, versus the hegemony of CBD.

Joe Biden's choice of running mate is Kamala Harris, who will bring a more progressive position on cannabis to the ticket. But if Harris today embraces legalization, she too has capitulated to the drug war establishment in the past—a reality her critics have been quick to exploit. A review of her record reveals an overall evolution toward a more enlightened stance.

Equity programs for the legal cannabis industry in California are supposed to address the racial and social iniquities that were associated with cannabis prohibition. But finding the right implementation model has proved tricky. And as a recent controversy in Los Angeles indicates, the failure of such programs can have impacts that go beyond who is getting licenses for dispensaries.

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.

Lockdowns and economic paralysis imposed by the COVID-19 outbreak are spurring a new emphasis on self-sufficiency. Even before the crisis, medicinal cannabis users facing shortages at local dispensaries were turning to home cultivation.

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.