Global Ganja Report

Voters in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon and South Dakota passed statewide ballot measures favoring medical marijuana, adult-use cannabis legalization or hemp cultivation in the Nov. 3 elections.

Questions about road safety have been a real concern as cannabis legalization has unfolded across 11 states, with medical marijuana laws in many more. But with several years of data to analyze, a new study finds no link between these policies and traffic fatalities.

Israel is a world leader in medical marijuana and has adopted an experimental decriminalization policy. But activists are pushing to make it the world's third country to outright legalize—and are using some very audacious tactics.

Equity programs for the legal cannabis industry in California are supposed to address the racial and social iniquities that were associated with cannabis prohibition. But finding the right implementation model has proved tricky. And as a recent controversy in Los Angeles indicates, the failure of such programs can have impacts that go beyond who is getting licenses for dispensaries.

As New Jersey awaits a November ballot initiative on legalization, the state's governor invoked cannabis as a potential key to post-pandemic economic recovery, as well as an imperative for racial justice. But even if the vote passes, deadlock in the statehouse could still be an obstacle to implementation.

Mexico's President Lopez Obrador met with Trump at the White House this week to inaugurate the new trade treaty that replaces NAFTA. Embarrassingly, the meeting was punctuated by horrific new outbursts of narco-violence in Mexico. And the country's promised cannabis legalization—mandated by the high court and looked to as a de-escalation of the dystopian drug war—is stalled by a paralyzed Congress. 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and historic levels of unemployment, Illinois cannabis retailers saw record-breaking sales in June, taking in nearly $48 million in revenues.

Can Rural America's Expropriated Use a New Crop to Forge a New Agrarianism?

Green Heffa Farms, in North Carolina’s Piedmont, has emerged as a national symbol of vision and success in America’s new hemp economy. As a producer of boutique full-spectrum hemp-flower products, it has won a cachet in the industry—which is augmented, at least in more enlightened sectors, by the fact that it is Black-owned, and has an overt political consciousness.

Green Heffa’s CEO is Clarenda Stanley—popularly known as Farmer Cee. She was featured in the April issue of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine, and was last year the 2019 “Featured Farmer” for National Hemp History Week.