Global Ganja Report

The trial of a paralyzed man who was prosecuted by Swedish authorities for self-medicating with cannabis sparked debate over the right to cultivate medicinal herb in the Scandinavian nation. Now Sweden's Supreme Court has just ruled against the defendant, dealing a blow to the right to self-medicate.

Spain made unwanted international headlines Oct. 7 when nearly four metric tons of cocaine worth an estimated $260 million was seized by Spanish customs officers in the Atlantic, headed for the Iberian peninsula. The haul was found on a tugboat between Portugal's Madeira and Azores islands, with 165 packages of cocaine each weighing 23 kilograms—for a total of 3.7 tons—concealed beneath the vessel's cooking area. The operation was jointly conducted with UK's National Crime Agency under the co-ordination of the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre-Narcotics (MAOC-N) in Lisbon. The crew, from Turkey and Azerbaijan, were arrested.

A cannabis "shatter" production lab in England's North East, said to be the first of its kind in the post-industrial region, was busted Oct. 12 in a paramilitary-style raid by the Northumbria Police. Local media show a squad of cops in full body armor breaking down the door and smashing the windows of a local property with buzz-saws, battering rams and pick-axes. Two arrests were made in the raid on the Croft Estate housing project in the town of Gateshead, just across the River Tyne from the historic city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. An unspecified number of plants as well as butane and other equipment were seized.

A district court in Oslo on Sept. 18 sentenced Norway's former top police official for organized crime to 21 years in prison for conspiracy to smuggle hashish. Eirik Jensen was arrested in 2014 after being secretly filmed in a meeting with Gjermund Cappelen, said to be Norway's biggest hashish importer. The two men were tired together.

The Republic of Ireland's long-promised medical marijuana law is being held up in the country's parliament, the Dáil—leading patients who have been waiting for legal herbal treatment in their own country to charge "betrayal." That was the exact word used by Irish mom Vera Twomey, speaking from the Netherlands, where she was seeking cannabis care for her daughter Ava, 9, an epilepsy sufferer. "What issue is more important than people all over the country in chronic pain?" she rhetorically asked Ireland's national broadcaster RTÉ, according to the Irish Times of July 13.

Spain's restive northeastern region of Catalonia and especially its freewheeling capital Barcelona have over the past years come to rival the Netherlands and and Amsterdam as a European cannabis hub. Smokers' clubs have proliferated, tolerated (and regulated) by the authroities. Now the regional government, the Generalitat de Catalunya, has passed a measure formally legalizing the clubs.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) last week issued its World Drug Report 2017—its 20th annual survey of production, trafficking and eradication and enforcement efforts around the globe. In past years, the report has sought to quantify the amount of cannabis cultivated in each producer country—over the past decade consistently placing Morocco in first place, generally followed by Mexico and Paraguay. This general trend continues—with some new variations.

Three of the Balkan states to emerge from the ashes of Yugoslavia a generation ago are now among the first countries in the ex-communist world to move toward embrace of medical marijuana.