Global Ganja Report

Emotional exchanges at City Council hearings in New York focused on the NYPD's "gang database," which critics say targets and stigmatizes even those who have long since cut ties to the city's "crews." The city has seen big militarized raids on housing projects as part of the crackdown on crews in recent years. But while heavy charges against suspected crew members made headlines at the time of the raids, little note was paid when some of those charges were downgraded to mere marijuana possession. Are claims of pot-dealing being used to place the city's Black and Latino youth on the database?

The seizure by federal agents of some 100 homes around Northern California supposedly used in grow operations financed by criminal networks based in China points to ongoing dilemmas in the state's contraband cannabis economy—which persists even in the wake of legalization.

The horrific case of an elderly Jewish woman in Paris killed in a clear anti-Semitic attack is being painted as an incidence of "cannabis delirium." Despite all the progress since the days of Reefer Madness in the 1930s, cannabis is still  blamed for violent crime by law enforcement and media alike. Such irrational ugliness has also been repeatedly seen in the cases that have inspired Black Lives Matter on our side of the Atlantic.

Several bills now pending before the Colorado state house will further shape what the legal cannabis economy will look like in the Centennial State—for better or for worse. While some of these measures would mean a freer atmosphere both for "recreational" and medicinal users, others may portend greater big-money control of the fast-growing industry.

Seniors are the fastest growing group of medicinal cannabis users in the country, and a growing number of nursing homes from coast to coast are tolerating use of tinctures and extracts to combat dementia, insomnia and related ailments. Patient testimony is now backed up by research, with scientists identifying the mechanism by which cannabinoids slow the deterioration of neurons in the brain. But federal strictures continue to pose an obstacle to investigation—leaving medicinal users in the cold under US law.

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.

In a sure sign of changing times, the first cannabis-industry business has been listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange—raising clear questions about how long prohibition can hang on in the face of a burgeoning economic sector. Toronto-based medical marijuana producer Cronos Group won approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to become the first cannabis company listed on NASDAQ, New York City's second biggest stock market, Bloomberg reported Feb. 26.

Even back in the bad old days of Reefer Madness in the 1930s, when marijuana's association with Mexican immigrants and African American musicians was used as propaganda for the first federal laws banning the weed, it never came to this. But the canard that cannabis is a tool in a sinister Jewish conspiracy to subvert wholesome white American youth has now entered (almost) mainstream discourse.