Global Ganja Report

A Bollywood celebrity was arrested for supposedly using hashish and other drugs on a cruise ship off Mumbai—one of a slew of high-profile cases that have embarrassed India's entertainment industry and political establishment. Apart from providing fodder for the gossip columns, however, the affair raises serious concerns about civil rights in "the world's largest democracy."

It's pretty surreal that even as a legal cannabis industry emerges on a global scale, there are still countries that impose outrageously draconian sentences for the herb—up to and including the death penalty.

The egregious case of a man sentenced to death for smuggling two pounds of cannabis into the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore has focused global attention on the disturbing reality.

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."

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.

The global cannabis economy is now reaching Oceania, with commercial cultivation underway in Australia, a legalization referendum coming up in New Zealand, and legal barriers starting to come down in the Pacific Islands. 

A growing number of countries on the African continent are looking to cannabis as the ticket out of poverty, and foreign investment for this sector is flooding in. Activists who pushed for legal commercial cultivation will now face the challenge of crafting a cannabis economy that empowers small farmers and rural communities, rather than replicating the elitist forms of past agro-export industries.

Digital technology is rapidly colonizing every sphere of human existence, and the cannabis industry is certainly no exception. Entrepreneurs are aggressively plugging the application of artificial intelligence in everything from automating grow operations to matching strains with symptoms they are effective against. But is there a downside?

Canada's largest licensed producer of cannabis, with globe-spanning operations, is shutting down two massive greenhouses in British Columbia, and laying off hundreds of workers. Industry observers call it a sign that infrastructure overshot the market in the post-legalization euphoria.