Global Ganja Report

Veteran war photographer Teun Voeten has worked in conflict zones from Afghanistan and Iraq to Rwanda and Sierra Leone, to Haiti, Nicaragua and Colombia. Now he makes the leap into academia, with his newly published doctoral thesis, Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty. Voeten attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the unrelenting cartel wars that may now threaten an actual collapse of the government in the United States' southern neighbor.

At the annual Vienna meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the governing body of the UN Office on Drugs & Crime (UNODC) voted Dec. 2 to strike cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the global treaty regulating drug control policy.

Hemp’s Curious Cultural Trajectory

Now that hemp has finally arrived at its long-sought status as a legal crop and commodity, there is a sense of inevitability to its deviation from the utopian vision that animated the advocates who fought for it a generation ago.

A tension that has always existed between two currents in the subculture of hemp advocacy is increasingly weighted toward the more mundane—activists versus entrepreneurs, idealism versus pragmatism, agrarianism versus agribusiness. And finally the original paradigm of a crop with multitudinous uses as “food, fuel and fiber,” holding the potential to solve humanity’s ecological crisis, versus the hegemony of CBD.

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. 

Mexican lawmakers are predicting legal cannabis by month's end, and portraying it as a key to de-escalating the endemic narco-violence. But national headlines are full of nightmarish cartel violence—making all too clear how big the challenge will be.

2019 saw advances for cannabis freedom on both the national and global stage—but also some near-misses, from New York state to Mexico, which have left activists frustrated if no less determined. As advocates prepare to carry the fight into 2020, here's a review of what was achieved—or almost achieved—over the past 12 months.

Cannabis may be legal in California, but illicit cultivation persists—especially in the National Forests, where it often takes a grave ecological toll. The CROP Project—for Cannabis Removal On Public Lands—is now bringing together environmentalists, law enforcement and the legal cannabis industry for a coordinated approach to the problem.

There is a discomforting sense that Mexico is perpetually on the eve of cannabis legalization, as the country's Congress wins a six-month extension from the Supreme Court to pass a law freeing the herb. But foreign capital is already eyeing Mexico's emergent legal cannabis sector—even amid a terrifying escalation in the bloody cartel wars.