Global Ganja Report

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.

Martin Luther King Jr never spoke about cannabis, but his life and works have much to say about the fight for legalization, and against the "New Jim Crow" of the war on drugs. 

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) last month issued its World Drug Report 2019—its 22nd annual survey of production, trafficking and eradication and enforcement efforts around the world. In addition to providing figures on cocaine and opiates, the report seeks to quantify the amount of cannabis cultivated in each producer country.

Albania is pledging another one of its endless and fruitless cannabis eradication campaigns, which never succeed in bumping the country from its spot as Europe's biggest illicit producer. The US is pressing the small Balkan nation for the campaign—and kicking in military aid.

Notorious narco-lord "Chapo" Guzmán was convicted by a federal jury in New York and faces life in prison. But violence in Mexico has only escalated since his capture. Few media accounts have noted how Chapo and his Sinaloa Cartel rose as militarized narcotics enforcement escalated in Mexico—a trajectory mirrored by the cartels' move from dealing in cannabis to deadly white powders.

A contraband cannabis economy booms in the Balkan Peninsula, where the wars of the 1990s spurred an underground dope-for-guns network that still thrives today. But amid EU pressure to crack down, a legal industry is now starting to emerge.

Colombia is facing a strange contradiction—foreign capital is pouring in for the legalized cannabis sector, yet the new right-wing President Iván Duque is returning to the hardline "drug war" policies that the country has moved away from in recent years. This means not only a resumption of glyphosate spraying to wipe out illegal crops in the countryside, but an overturn of the former decriminalization policy. Street arrests for cannabis use and possession have soared since Duque issued his recrim decree.

An international network of non-governmental organizations has submitted a "shadow report" to the United Nations, calling the war on drugs a "spectacular failure"—and calling on the world's governments to reconsider it. The report takes heart from the growing official tolerance of cannabis in several countries around the world, but warns of escalating and horrific repression in the name of drug enforcement in several others. Will the UN take heed when it revisits the question of drug policy in 2019?