Global Ganja Report

A new report by the British think-tank Prohibition Partners foresees a $5.8 billion cannabis market in Asia by 2024—if the tentative seeds of liberalization now witnessed across the continent in fact bear fruit.

California's ArcView Market Research and its affiliated BDS Analytics have released a "2019 Update" to the 6th edition of their report on The State of Legal Marijuana Markets, which was published back in June. The Update takes stock of events in the second half of the year, and anticipates that worldwide spending on legal cannabis will grow 39.1% to $17 billion in 2019.

2018 saw historic strides toward the liberation of the cannabis plant, from the proverbial four corners of the Earth—North America to the Antipodes. Canadian legalization garnered big headlines, but there were significant breaks with the global prohibition regime in several other countries—including some seemingly unlikely candidates, in regions where the anti-cannabis stigma is deeply entrenched.

While Canada's move to officially legalize cannabis has been hailed as courageous and historic by advocates around the world, some of the planet's most intolerant governments are reacting with dismay—even threatening to have their own citizens arrested if they indulge in legal marijuana on Canadian sovereign territory.

The cannabis prohibition regime in South Korea is a harsh one. Authorities have long been intent on maintaining the official fiction of a "drug-free" nation. But the first crack has appeared in this intolerant edifice, with lawmakers and bureaucrats now moving to approve use of certain imported medical marijuana products.

Authorities in South Korea have long boasted that the country is "drug free," but that fiction is getting harder to maintain. Korea JoongAang Daily on July 6 reports that the amount of drugs seized by customs agents in the Republic of Korea jumped significantly in the first half of this year. The Customs Service said it seized 27.5 kilograms (60.6 pounds) of drugs worth 41.3 billion won ($35.9 million) in the first six months of 2017.

Well, absolutely not, but you could be forgiven for thinking so, based on a cursory review of recent headlines.

Although it hasn't made much of a splash stateside, the big news in the South this week is the "marijuana scandal" surrounding a singer from the suggestively named K-pop boy-band Big Bang, who goes by the stage-name T.O.P.

Here we go again. The Weed Blog was last week the latest to repeat the urban legend that cannabis is legal in North Korea. Earlier this year, the same click-bait nonsense was heard on a YouTube video produced by TopTrending.com. The mis-informed line goes like this (in the Weed Blog's gushy prose): "North Korea doesn’t consider marijuana a drug at all, and is completely legal in the country. [Sic] That's right. I can repeat that: marijuana is completely legal in the country of North Korea." You can repeat it all you want, but that doesn't make it true. It's an absurd irony that probably the most cannabis-unfriendly country on Earth has won a rep as a free zone where the stuff is legal. How did this all get started?