Global Ganja Report

At the annual Vienna meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the governing body of the UN Office on Drugs & Crime (UNODC) voted Dec. 2 to strike cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the global treaty regulating drug control policy.

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.

A new day has dawned for medical marijuana patients in Argentina, who have finally won the right to home cultivation, three and a half years after medicinal use of cannabis derivatives was officially legalized in the South American country.

President Alberto Fernández on Nov. 12 signed a decree that had been issued by the Health Ministry earlier this year, stating: "It is imperative to create a regulatory framework that allows timely, inclusive and secure access for those who require to use cannabis as a therapeutic tool."

The tradition of cannabis cultivation, hashish production and sacramental use goes back millennia in Nepal, and the country was among the last to sign up to the global prohibition regime. Now, a legalization effort is underway in parliament—even as eradication operations continue.

Voters in Montana passed a ballot measure mandating legalization of adult-use cannabis. But there was a pre-emptive attempt in the state legislature to repeal it before it even passed. Montana's road to legalization has been a long and twisted one, and there may be further political fights ahead. 

Lebanon, long the Middle East's heartland of hashish, has legalized cannabis cultivation for the medical market—but before the law has even taken effect, rumblings of cynicism are heard from the country's traditional growers. The outlaw growers in the Bekaa Valley, with its centuries-long tradition of hash production, will likely remain illicit and face continued militarized enforcement—while corporate producers with state-of-the-art greenhouses on the urbanized coast dominate the industry. And the hashish market has been hard hit by the country's deep economic crisis, leaving the Bekaa cannabis farmers struggling.

A British pretty-boy model getting popped for pot and facing a lengthy term in notoriously harsh prisons has again focused international attention on Indonesia's anti-drug police state. But countless others suffer in the shadows—including some 150 on death row for drug charges. And recent progress in official recognition of (at least) the medicinal properties of cannabis has been rolled back.

Questions about road safety have been a real concern as cannabis legalization has unfolded across 11 states, with medical marijuana laws in many more. But with several years of data to analyze, a new study finds no link between these policies and traffic fatalities.