Global Ganja Report

For the second year in a row, Brazil has witnessed a deadly prison riot on the first day of the year. A death toll of nine is reported from the central state of Goias. One inmate was decapitated. The violence began New Year's Day afternoon at the rural penitentiary in the outskirts of the state capital, Goiania. Rival criminal factions clashed, broke the barriers of the compound and escaped, by the BBC News account.

Media accounts mostly played it for laughs when a confused pot dealer cluelessly got into a police car outside Copenhagen's famous squatter community of Christiania on Dec. 21, apparently thinking it was a taxi-cab. The cops searched him and found 1,000 pre-rolled joints.

In a lugubrious public spectacle, a Chinese court sentenced 10 people to death before a crowd of thousands at a stadium in the southern city of Lufeng Dec. 15. Of course, most were convicted of drug-related crimes, According to a harrowing report in South China Morning Post, they were summarily tried on the spot, and immediately taken away for execution. The grim ceremony kicked off a new anti-drug campaign in the People's Republic of China.

Unprecedented hearings before a panel of nine federal judges at the Dirksen US Courthouse in Chicago opened Dec. 14, charged with determining whether there was a pattern of racial bias in sting operations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) dating back to the 1990s. The hearings were called to resolve a dozen separate cases involving more than 40 defendants. An overflow courtroom was set up to handle the crowd, Chicago Tribune reports.

The Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte—trying to justify sending the National Police back into drug enforcement after he was pressured to withdraw them by a public outcry over their slaying of innocent civilians—seems to have just been caught in a lie. He stated Dec. 7 that 242 police officers have been killed in anti-drug operations since he took office on June 30, 2016—this by way of providing a rationale for the police killing thousands of Filipinos in this same period. He said, in his typically crude syntax: "[W]hy is it, if it is not that dangerous and violent, why is it that to date, I have lost 242 policemen in drug-related raids and arrest?"

New York City, despite its liberal reputation, has long been the marijuana arrest capital of the USA. So many herbal advocates were heartened by the recent poll (carried out by Emerson College on behalf of the Marijuana Policy Project and Drug Policy Alliance) finding that 62% of New York's registered voters support legalizing and taxing cannabis to help close the state's budget gap, with 28% opposed. But some activists are quick to remind us that even as the public comes around on the question, all too little has changed on the city's streets.

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women march in Nicaragua's capital Nov. 25 was ironically set upon by the riot police, with several women detained. The Managua march was emotionally charged, as it was led by Elea Valle—a campesina woman whose husband and two young sons were killed two weeks earlier in a raid by army troops on their home in the country's eastern rainforest.

Just a matter of weeks after the Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte won rare favorable headlines by pledging to pull the National Police out of his ultra-deadly "war on drugs," he is already backpeddaling and threatening to send them back in—as cynics had predicted. Duterte made his threat Nov. 18 in a speech at a business event in his hometown Davao City (where he first honed his death-squad tactics when he served there as mayor). "The drug problem, if it becomes worse again, the police has to enter the picture," he said in his typically crude syntax. "I want it eradicated if possible."