Global Ganja Report

So-called "smokable hemp" is suddenly available in shops from coast to coast, legal under terms of last year's Farm Bill. But law enforcement is consternated, conservative politicians are apoplectic, and legislation is being prepared to ban the stuff at the state level. Is this permissible under federal law?

The prosecutor for Miami-Dade County is the latest of several around the country to halt minor cannabis cases. The move was prompted by a dilemma vexing law enforcement nationwide: the inability to distinguish between THC and legal CBD in confiscated samples.

Some states that have legalized cannabis are seeing a surge in the illicit market—and attendant police raids and repression. The dystopia that legalization was supposed to leave behind has proved disconcertingly persistent. But is the problem, as conservatives claim, legalization itself—or that is hasn't gone far enough?

The arrival of 7-10 as a special day to celebrate extracts and concentrates marks the growing embrace of "dabbing" by the cannabis community. But the laws governing such products and especially their production vary from state to state. And the real risks continue to garner grim headlines that cast the cannabis industry in a very poor light.

With the end of the legislative session in Albany closing in, odds for legalizing cannabis in New York state this year are fast diminishing. Now a new bill has been introduced, to reconcile rival versions pushed by the Assembly and Gov. Cuomo. It has won support from advocates—but, with the clock ticking, Cuomo equivocates on whether he will support it.

The news that CBD products will be arriving at Walgreens and CVS drugstore chains can be seen as further progress for the normalization of cannabis. But it is also a further indication of corporate control of the new cannabis economy.

In a win both for cannabis freedom and racial justice, Vermont's top court ruled in favor of a motorist whose car was searched on the ostensible basis that a state trooper smelled pot—and the probable basis that he is African American.

With passage of the Farm Bill and removal of hemp-derived CBD from controlled substance status, big market growth is expected for the very chic and purportedly salubrious non-psychoactive cannabinoid. The law is a win for a nascent CBD industry that has been struggling to shake off the lingering stigma surrounding (psychoactive) cannabis. The effort to segment cannabidiol from "marijuana" is exemplified in the several states that now have "CBD-only" laws.