Global Ganja Report

After a one-year hiatus for just the second time since 1973 (the other being the pandemic year of 2020), New York City's Cannabis Parade returned to Lower Manhattan on May 3. The event had become increasingly mainstream in recent years, even drawing big-name politicians—like Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2021 and '22. The next year, the NYC Department of Small Business Services' new cannabis office issued a statement marking the event's 50th anniversary, and paying homage to its Yippie founders! The year after that, 2024, the City became an official partner in the event. But in 2025, the City would not grant a permit for either Washington Square Park or Union Square, the two traditional locations, and instead held a more commercialized NYC Cannabis Festival & Resource Fair outside the Harlem State Office Building on 125th Street. This year, however, downtown activists succeeded in getting a permit for a rally in Washington Square and march to Union Square, where a concert was held featuring the punk-reggae-hip-hop fusion bands Ricanstruction and Rebelmatic. The adversarial spirit, in spite of New York's legalization, brought the event back to its radical roots.

"Country Joe” McDonald of the band Country Joe & the Fish, immortalized as an icon of the 1960s counterculture through his proudly subversive performance at the Woodstock festival, died March 7 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 84. In the defining moment of his career, he led a crowd of nearly half a million at the 1969 Upstate New York mega-concert in the "Fish Cheer" (spelling out the word FUCK) before launching into his satirical anti-war anthem "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin'-to-Die Rag."

For those, such as myself, who came of age in the prohibition era, it was a tad surreal to see the giant electronic billboard overlooking Manhattan’s Times Square (focal point of the world-famous New Years Eve countdown) displaying a “countdown to 420” promoted by a leading brand of rolling papers. But that is what gathered revelers witnessed in the minutes leading up to 4:20 PM on the afternoon of Sunday, April 20.

The son of late reggae legend Peter Tosh, himself a successful musical artist who recorded under the stage name Tosh 1, has died at the age of 40. He'd never fully recovered from a brutal 2017 beating in a New Jersey jail, where he was serving time on a cannabis charge.

New York City's annual Cannabis Parade, launched long ago by Yippie counterculture freaks, this year headlined one of the Big Apple's highest officials, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams—a sure sign of that the leaglization cause has hit the mainstream. However, politicking in the statehouse in Albany has stalled passage of a long hoped-for legalization bill.

A showdown is shaping up in Vancouver, where the city's 420 event has always been held with no permit. This year it promises to be huge, with Cypress Hill headlining—and authorities pressing for cancellation. Organizers pledge the event will go ahead—with approval of the bureaucracy or not.

On the eve of 420, a National Cannabis Policy Summit will convene in the nation's capital, joining industry leaders, activists and elected officials to discuss how legalization could look in the United States—and how to get there.

April 20—popularly known as 420—has emerged as a global day of celebration of cannabis culture. But a group of activists have launched an effort to the make the next day the one that grapples with the challenge of creating an equitable, inclusive and diverse cannabis industry.