Global Ganja Report

John Sinclair—poet, activist and leading figure in America's radical youth movement of the 1960s—died in a Detroit hospital April 2 at the age of 82. He was famous as manager and central personality behind the Motor City proto-punk band MC5, and a founder of the White Panther Party—a militant anti-racist group seen as a white working-class counterpart to the Black Panthers. His conviction and draconian sentence for a small-scale cannabis charge in 1969 made him a national and even global icon, immortalized in an eponymous John Lennon song. The legal battle and campaign to free him ultimately resulted in the overturn of the absurdly harsh marijuana law in his native Michigan.

Raphael Mechoulam, the ground-breaking cannabis researcher who first isolated and identified THC in 1964, died in Israel at the age of 92. His passing was announced March 10 by Jerusalem's Hebrew University, where Mechoulam co-founded the Multidisciplinary Center for Cannabinoid Research in 2017.

David Crosby, a giant of California's 1960s folk-rock scene and leading light of the Woodstock generation, died Jan. 19 at the age of 81. To the end, he was an unapologetic advocate of cannabis legalization, serving as a member of the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

Michael Butler, the Tony-winning producer who financed the 1968 Broadway sensation Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a key moment in the mainstreaming of the '60s counterculture, passed away Nov. 7 in Los Angeles at the age of 95.

Peter Lamborn Wilson, celebrated "underground intellectual" and a pivotal figure in the revival of American anarchism over the past 40 years, died May 23 at his home in Saugerties, NY, reportedly from a heart attack. A controversial as well as inspirational figure, Wilson was the author of several cult classics, ranging from ecstatic rants to anti-authoritarian interpretations of history and what he called "drop-out culture."

Peter Gorman, the acclaimed journalist, naturalist and adventurer who aggressively covered cannabis and the drug war beat for over 30 years, died at his home in Texas on April 24 at the age of 71. He had just returned from a long-planned river journey into a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon that he had first visited in 1984, and where he first encountered the psychoactive shamanic substances that would define much of his life's work.

Reggae group the Mighty Diamonds' lead singer Tabby Diamond (née Donald Shaw) was shot and killed in Jamaica in a drive-by attack on March 29. Five people were hit with two dying in the St. Andrew South area. Shaw was 67.

The Mighty Diamonds were founded in 1967, but didn't release their first album until 1976. Their best-known song, 1981's "Pass the Kouchie," is about smoking ganja. One year later, Musical Youth's cover of the song, retitled "Pass the Dutchie," was a No. 10 hit in the US.

Bunny Wailer, a founder of the reggae musical genre, died in Kingston on March 2 at the age of 73. He was the last surviving member of the original Wailers, following Bob Marley's death from cancer in 1981, and Peter Tosh's murder during a robbery in 1987.