Global Ganja Report

Gains are reported from Massachusetts in organized labor's push to unionize the cannabis industry. But significant obstacles remain—from management roadblocking, to the ambiguous status under national labor law of an industry dealing in a federally illegal substance.

The autumn of 2019 saw the United States' first hemp harvest since effective prohibition of the crop under the strictures of the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937. These strictures were overturned in the Farm Bill signed into law by President Trump in the closing days of 2018. This harvest was looked to eagerly across much of rural America, as legal hemp had been plugged as a salvation for the nation's struggling farmers—and the soaring popularity of CBD appeared to provide a booming market. The fashionable cannabinoid had also been legalized by the 2018 Farm Bill—when derived from hemp, or cannabis with less than 0.3% THC.

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.

An egregious incident of police abuse in Brooklyn has gone viral on the internet—and re-ignited public anger over racist marijuana enforcement in New York City.

The new budget just released by New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo includes his promised cannabis legalization measure. But activists in the Empire State will be watching closely to see if the proposed legislation delivers on his pledge to instate legalization in a way the corrects the social harms of prohibition.

Martin Luther King Jr never spoke about cannabis, but his life and works have much to say about the fight for legalization, and against the "New Jim Crow" of the war on drugs. 

Growing numbers around the United States and the world are using cannabis to treat a wide spectrum of medical conditions, and legal space is widening for them to do so. So it's a particular irony that hospitals as a rule bar cannabis from their premises. More voices in the medical industry are now grappling with this dilemma.

Political space for cannabis is generally on the upswing, but there are some intersecting trends that advocates will need to keep a sharp eye on in the coming year. Corporate cannabis will increase pressure on independent producers, while prohibitionists will try to leverage the vape health scare for anti-cannabis propaganda. And the cannabis industry's own terminology may be actually adding to the confusion.