Global Ganja Report

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?

As Massachusetts unfolds its legal cannabis market, the Boston area got its first retail outlet with the opening of a Brookline dispensary. Planners are concerned with orderly growth, while advocates demand that the Bay State's new cannabis order emphasize local control.

After years of upholding employee firings for use of cannabis even under state medical marijuana programs, the courts are finally starting to turn around on the question.

One of the ways state medical marijuana programs have failed to fully extend protection to medicinal users is in failure to defend against employment discrimination. This is now beginning to change, thanks to a few recent court decisions in favor of patients and employees.

The first of July opened a new chapter for legal cannabis in two New England states—at least in theory. Vermont's adult use law officially took effect, while Massachusetts was slated to see the first legal adult-use sales. But the Vermont law doesn't allow for commercial sales, and legal sales in Massachusetts remain delayed.

New Mexico is the latest state to announce that it will play host to the biggest legal cannabis grow operation in the United States. But other claims to that title over the past years have still not panned out, and a facility in Arizona now occupies the number one slot. And as various states vie for the honor, Canada is far in the lead of its southern neighbor.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts issued a unanimous ruling  Sept. 19, voiding court testimony based on "sobriety tests" carried out by police on motorists suspected of driving while high on pot. The Boston Globe reports that in limiting evidence from the familiar roadside tests used to snare drunk drivers—walking in a straight line, standing on one foot—the court found there is no scientific consensus those tests definitively prove someone is under the influence of cannabis.

After last weekend's horrorshow in Charlottesville, it's a relief that the white supremacist hate-fest planned for Boston on Aug. 19 (sickeningly billed as a "Free Speech" rally) was a total bust. Just some 40-odd "alt-right" protesters gathered on the historic Boston Common, dwarfed by about 40,000 counter-protesters, who chanted "wrong side of history" and "shame, shame." Eventually, police escorted the small group of haters with their Nazi regalia away to safety, and that was that.

Amid all the current paranoia about hackers infiltrating the highest levels of American politics comes the disturbing news that software used by cannabis businesses in over 20 states was attacked and compromised. The story was reported both by the cannabis industry trade website Marijuana Business Daily and tech sites that monitor such attacks, including Hackbusters and DataBreaches. The software, known as MJ Freeway, is used for "seed-to-sale" tracking of cannabis in states that have legalized or passed medical marijuana laws. The Denver-based company said its main servers and backup system both went down the morning of Jan. 8, and remained offline as of the next afternoon.