Global Ganja Report

US air-strikes on so-called "drug boats" have now destroyed 30 vessels and killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. And on Dec. 26, President Donald Trump boasted in a radio interview that the United States had knocked out "a big facility"—implying that it was a drug-trafficking hub on the Venezuelan mainland, although he provided no details and neither the White House, Pentagon nor US intelligence agencies would comment.

In response to the growing tensions between the Trump White House and Colombia, the South American nation's President Gustavo Petro called for replacing the policy of marijuana prohibition with a regulatory framework allowing for adult use and international export of cannabis, like "any good."

It’s a fairly open secret that Brittney Griner was Putin’s geopolitical pawn when she was in Russian detention for nine months on a minor cannabis charge. And her freedom came at a high price—swapped for a Russian “Death Merchant” who now boasts he’ll aid Putin’s savage war in Ukraine. But GOP exploitation of Griner indicates that she remains a political pawn even as a free woman in America.

US Olympic gold-medalist Brittney Griner, held in a Russian jail since February, is finally going before a judge. But the trial is looking more and more like a political show.

The odds for justice in Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russia are already slim—and especially, we may assume, for a dreadlocked African American icon of the international LGBTQ community. But the war in Ukraine and the geopolitical rivalry between Moscow and Washington are now explicitly at play in the case of Brittney Griner.

Colombia is at a crossroads with the historic election of the left-populist Gustavo Petro as president. But will he be able to close the country’s cannabis gap? Big Bud is booming, while small peasant producers face continued eradication.

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.

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 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.