Global Ganja Report

Election day, Nov. 5, saw the defeat of ballot measures to legalize cannabis in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota. In Florida, the measure actually received upwards of 1.2 million more "yes" than "no" votes. However, because of unique rules in Florida, the constitutional amendment required support from a supermajority (60%) of voters, and it did not meet that threshold. The amendment was publicly opposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who spent millions of dollars on taxpayer-funded messaging and made several unfounded claims against the initiative.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has pardoned over 4,800 individuals who were convicted or wanted for illegal cannabis cultivation, the Ministry of Justice announced Aug. 19. The move comes as part of the country's ongoing transition toward a regulated cannabis economy. The royal pardon, granted to 4,831 people involved in cannabis-related cases, came on the eve of Morocco's Revolution Day, commemorating the 1953 uprising against French colonial rule.

Those stigmatized as “drug dealers” can be good people too seems to be the overarching message in A Weed Grows in Boston by Valerie Vande Panne. The slim volume is a reproduction of a news story that originally ran in 2009 in the Boston Phoenix, which received both an AltWeekly award and a New England Newspaper & Press Association award. The author is former news editor for High Times, yet she is amusingly shocked by how ordinary is “Mary Jones” (the pseudonym given to the subject).

Legalization in states across the country has led to a reassessment of the word "marijuana." Is it a dated term with racist roots? Many advocates seem to think so. I'm not one of them. Now, Cannabis vs Marijuana: Language, Landscape and Context, a new book by David Paleschuck, dives into the debate. It's a polemic with just one point of view on the cannabis vs. marijuana subject. In the intro, he writes:

John Sinclair—poet, activist and leading figure in America's radical youth movement of the 1960s—died in a Detroit hospital April 2 at the age of 82. He was famous as manager and central personality behind the Motor City proto-punk band MC5, and a founder of the White Panther Party—a militant anti-racist group seen as a white working-class counterpart to the Black Panthers. His conviction and draconian sentence for a small-scale cannabis charge in 1969 made him a national and even global icon, immortalized in an eponymous John Lennon song. The legal battle and campaign to free him ultimately resulted in the overturn of the absurdly harsh marijuana law in his native Michigan.

Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, passed a bill Feb. 23 legalizing the regulated production and  consumption of cannabis. The legislation was brought by the federal government, led by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), the center-right Free Democratic Party (FDP), and the ecologist Greens party. In a roll-call vote, 407 MPs supported the law, 226 opposed it, and four abstained. The legislation faced opposition from the conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and affiliated Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) as well as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). 

President Joe Biden announced Dec. 21 a new pardon policy for federal cannabis offenses. Biden stated: "Criminal records for marijuana use and possession have imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It's time that we right these wrongs."