Global Ganja Report

California's Gov. Jerry Brown has unveiled a special investigative force to go after unregistered cannabis growers. This is certainly bad news for the many growers who have failed to register because they consider the taxes and regulations burdensome. In the face of disappointing tax revenues from legal cannabis, is the state using the stick of enforcement rather than the carrot of lower taxes and more favorable regulations to bring more growers in from the shadows?

A federal appeals court has turned down a challenge by the cannabis industry to the DEA's official finding that CBD is a controlled substance. But questions about whether CBD should be treated as a controlled substance remain pending at the state level.

Oakland-based cannabis industry research firm ArcView Group has released a new study, ambitiously entitled "The Road Map to a $57 Billion Worldwide Market." It provides a sweeping overview of recent progress and future prospects for legal or medical herb across the globe. But it also warns that, due to continued legal restrictions and bureaucratic overstretch, the market is in most areas bottlenecked from achieving its potential.

A United Nations study brings back the surprise finding that the world's biggest producer of legal cannabis is Great Britain. The answer to this seeming anomaly lies in one UK-based multinational corporation with industrial-scale grow operations for production of pharmaceuticals.

Many things are falling into place as Canada advances toward legal cannabis, expected to take effect this summer. Provinces are to come up with their own policies on regulation, and these are now congealing. The government of Nova Scotia has agreed on a plan to market retail cannabis at liquor stores through the provincial public company that now maintains a monopoly on alcohol sales, the Canadian Broadcasting Company reports. At the other end of the continent, British Columbia is also said to be considering such a plan.

A welcome blow is reported against the deeply ingrained stigma that attaches even to users of basically harmless drugs like cannabis that happen to be illegal. The Global Commission on Drug Policy—a body with dissident views but made up of prestigious elder statesmen and world leaders, so it can't be readily ignored—has just issued a statement calling on policymakers and the media to avoid using terms such as "drug user," "addict" and "junkie." The report includes a checklist of what terms should be eschewed or embraced to avoid language portraying people who use drugs as "physically inferior or morally flawed."

As California legalizes cannabis on Jan. 1, it will be opening the door to multiple conflicts with the federal government. How state and federal authorities manage to negotiate the overlapping jurisdictions with now completely contradictory policies will be interesting to watch. In one obvious example, the Associated Press notes that state legalization won't stop federal agents from seizing even in small quantities at checkpoints they maintain on the Golden State's busy freeways.

California state authorities have issued new regulations governing the legal cannabis market that is to be officially instated on Jan. 1. Jointly drawn up by the Department of Health, Department of Food & Agriculture and the new Bureau of Cannabis Control, the regs are meeting with some trepidation from the Golden State's traditional cannabis sector. Most controversially, many small growers were disappointed that the regs include no limit on the number of licenses a single grower can hold or the total acreage one can farm.