Global Ganja Report

Cannabis is set to become legal in Colorado and Washington after voters passed historic ballot initiatives on Nov. 6. In Washington voters approved Initiative 502, allowing possession and distribution of cannabis through a state licensing system of growers, processors and stores, where adults will be able to buy up to an ounce of dried cannabis; up to a pound of a cannabis-infused product, such as brownies; or up to 72 ounces of cannabis-infused liquids.. The Colorado initiative actually introduces Amendment 64 to the state constitution, allowing adults over 21 to possess up to an ounce and to privately grow up to six plants—although public use will be banned. In Oregon, the similar Cannabis Tax Act Initiative or Measure 80, failed by approximately 55-to-45% of the vote.

The Arkansas Supreme Court announced Sept. 27 that it will allow the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Act  ballot initiative to go before the voters in November. The decision came in a suit brought by the Coalition to Preserve Arkansas Values (CPAV), which argued that the initiative text was "insufficient" as the full ballot title of the act is 384 words long and that "voters will not have adequate time in the voting booth to be reasonably advised on the impact of the Act." CPAV also claimed that the initiative would have been contrary to the US and Arkansas constitutions. In denying the  CPAV's claims, the court found that the text is free of "misleading tendencies or partisan coloring," and that the summary "informs the voters in an intelligible, honest and impartial manner" about what the measure would do.

A conservative Arkansas group seeking to prevent the state from becoming the first in the South to allow medical marijuana filed a lawsuit on Aug. 30 to remove an initiative from the November election ballot. The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Act qualified for the ballot after a statewide petition drive gathered the required amount of signatures. But the suit, filed in the state Supreme Court by the Coalition to Preserve Arkansas Values, argues the ballot's title is misleading and the text vaguely worded.

"A Miami man fatally shot by police after he refused to stop gnawing on another man's face may have been under the influence of a new form of the 1960s hallucinatory drug LSD, a top police officer said on Wednesday." So reads the Reuters account of the ghoulish May 29 incident that made national headlines—most of them inaccurate. The account quotes Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police saying: "We've had at least two incidents in the past couple of months with people claiming they took a new form of LSD and complained of feeling a burning sensation that forced them to take their clothes off and led them to become very violent." This is all nonsense. LSD is an acronym for a chemical formula; there is no such thing as a "new form" of lysergic acid diethylamide. So what is going on here?

Cornell Hood II got off with probation after three marijuana convictions in New Orleans. But after moving to St. Tammany Parish, a single such conviction landed the 35-year-old in prison for the rest of his life. Louisiana state Judge Raymond S. Childress punished Hood under Louisiana's repeat-offender law in his courtroom in Covington on May 5. A jury on Feb. 15 found Hood guilty of attempting to possess and distribute marijuana at his Slidell home.

After a widely publicized series of raids from Florida to New York City, on Oct. 5 the US Attorney's Southern District Office in Manhattan "announced the unsealing of an Indictment charging ten individuals and a complaint charging 40 individuals with participating in a massive marijuana trafficking ring that transported ton-quantities of marijuana from Florida and California for distribution in the greater New York area from the early 1990's to 2010."

Officials in Georgia's Bartow County said one person was arrested after they seized $250,000 worth of what local news accounts called a "rare drug" during a traffic stop on Interstate 75. Bartow-Cartersville Drug Task Force officials identified the substance as khat, a leaf chewed as a mild stimulant in the Horn of Africa and parts of the Middle East.