Global Ganja Report

An international network of non-governmental organizations has submitted a "shadow report" to the United Nations, calling the war on drugs a "spectacular failure"—and calling on the world's governments to reconsider it. The report takes heart from the growing official tolerance of cannabis in several countries around the world, but warns of escalating and horrific repression in the name of drug enforcement in several others. Will the UN take heed when it revisits the question of drug policy in 2019?

Sri Lanka has announced that it will start hanging drug convicts, ending a long moratorium on executions. Leaders explicitly hope to "replicate the success" of Rodrigo Duterte's bloody anti-drug campaign in the Philippines, which has now reached the point of mass murder. And while the imminent executions are for cocaine and heroin charges, the move comes amid a widening crackdown on cannabis. Yet proposals to allow medical cultivation provide some hope for a more tolerant model.

There are few places on Earth with as ancient a tradition of cannabis use as Kathmandu. From time immemorial, hashish has been used ceremonially in the Hindu temples of the Nepalese capital. Even after cannabis was outlawed in the Himalayan kingdom in 1973, authorities generally tolerated the practice. But now that seems to be changing.

A local Hindu deity has issued an edict ordering that guest-houses that cater to cannabis-imbibing tourists in a remote Indian village be shut down. That's the gist of the startling headline in Hindustan Times of July 11. Malana village, high in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh, is famous for its premium-quality hashish, but has traditionally been isolated from the outside world. Now village elders fear the community's unique culture is threatened by the swarms of tourists drawn by Malana's storied bhang.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) last week issued its World Drug Report 2017—its 20th annual survey of production, trafficking and eradication and enforcement efforts around the globe. In past years, the report has sought to quantify the amount of cannabis cultivated in each producer country—over the past decade consistently placing Morocco in first place, generally followed by Mexico and Paraguay. This general trend continues—with some new variations.

The rural marshlands of Bangladesh have become the latest part of the world to be hit by the unhappy global plague of methamphetamine use. More and more of the country's struggling peasants are taking to "yaba," little pink sugar-coated pills made from caffeine and meth that are flooding in from neighboring Burma. Annual seizures of yaba in Bangladesh increased by a jaw-dropping 80,000% over the past decade, authorities say. A disturbing on-the-scene report from Public Radio International emphasizes that in conservative and Muslim rural Bangladesh, yaba is not used as a "party drug." The speed pills are most often used to get folks through long days of hard labor.

The number of drug-related offenses is "higher than any other heinous crime in Nepal and is increasing at an alarming rate," according a none-too-objective March 17 account in Kathmandu's The Himalayan newspaper. The article credulously regurgitates the claims of a new report from the country's Narcotics Control Bureau, breaking down crime figures since 2011. The total for drug offenses rises to around 1,800, while those for murder and rape remain in the hudreds, and abduction in the two-digit range. And what kinds of drugs are at issue here? We are luridly told that "cultivation of genetically selected strains have [sic] led to increase in cannabis harvests. As a result, cannabis cultivation is increasing even in the hilly areas, posing a grave threat to security, according to the report."

The disputed region of Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan since 1949, has made scary headlines in recent months. Pro-independence militants are stepping up attacks on the India-controlled side, and the region is a potential flashpoint for war between the nuclear-armed South Asian giants. But it hardly comes as a surprise that a cannabis economy thrives on both sides of the Line of Control—despite the best efforts to suppress it by both Indian and Pakistani security forces. The Indian Police Service last week announced the arrest of Kashmir's most-wanted charas smuggler at a checkpoint in Tangmarg district, in the north of the India-controlled territory. The trafficker was named as Abdul Rehman Dar, but there is no reason to expect his fall to interrupt the illicit industry. The region's conservative Islamist press runs editorials scandalized by long-entrenched cultivation of bhang (cannabis) to produce charas (hashish), as well khash-khash (opium poppy).