Global Ganja Report

There has been significant progress toward cannabis legalization in the United States and globally over the past years, but pockets persist of the most repressive and reactionary prohibition. What are the prospects for expanding cannabis freedom in the coming year?

A Louisiana coroner declared a local woman's death to be the first on record attributed to a cannabis overdose, winning lurid national headlines. But medical experts and even federal officials as well as advocates are skeptical of the claim.

A scandal in New Orleans over false positives in the city's drug testing program comes just as a cannabis legalization bid died in the Louisiana statehouse. The Pelican State continues to have among the harshest cannabis laws in the country, but the contradictions are becoming sharper.

After what has been an agonizing delay for many patients, Louisiana's first medical marijuana harvest has just cleared inspection. But there are still more hurdles before the first extracts and tinctures will begin arriving in the state's nine approved pharmacies. 

Medical marijuana users who demand their right to smoke herbaceous cannabis were dealt a double whammy as Oklahoma health authorities and a Florida court each issued edicts upholding strictures on smokable forms. But is it really medical marijuana if it doesn't include the right to smoke the herbaceous form of the plant?

There have been quite a few histories of cannabis culture and politics, but Bruce Barcott's Weed The People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America is the first to examine the cannabis industry and its future prospects at a moment when it is taking flight. His opening overview of how we got to this point is engaging if not always strictly accurate (he loans too much credence to the '70s paraquat scare). He notes the litany of US government reports back to the 1920s exculpating cannabis of the calumnies against it—all ignored by the very government that commissioned them. He details the bureaucratic obstacles that have been raised to research on cannabis' medical benefits. And he relates the passing of the torch (or, more literally, the joint) from the jazz scene to the beatniks to the hippies to the mainstream.

It seems positively surreal that in the same USA where states like Colorado and Washington are legalizing cannabis, states like Louisiana are sending hapless souls up the river for possession of less than ounce—but this is indeed the case. New Orleans public interest attorney Bill Quigley in a Sept. 23 piece on the website Common Dreams notes the case of Corey Ladd, 27, a local man who on Sept. 24 was sentenced by a city criminal court to a full 20 years of "hard labor" at a state facility for holding 15 grams—that is, just slightly over half an ounce. 

Cornell Hood II got off with probation after three marijuana convictions in New Orleans. But after moving to St. Tammany Parish, a single such conviction landed the 35-year-old in prison for the rest of his life. Louisiana state Judge Raymond S. Childress punished Hood under Louisiana's repeat-offender law in his courtroom in Covington on May 5. A jury on Feb. 15 found Hood guilty of attempting to possess and distribute marijuana at his Slidell home.