Global Ganja Report

A new amendment to the Defense Department budget could allow service members to use CBD products—a direct response to a move by Pentagon brass to explicitly restrict all cannabis derivatives.

Amid national outrage over racial injustice, a Black disabled vet was sentenced to five years for cannabis that he uses medicinally in Alabama. A medical marijuana bill in the state seemed likely to pass this year, but was aborted when the legislature was shut down by the COVID-19 crisis. Alabama continues to have some of the harshest cannabis laws in the country.

As New Jersey awaits a November ballot initiative on legalization, the state's governor invoked cannabis as a potential key to post-pandemic economic recovery, as well as an imperative for racial justice. But even if the vote passes, deadlock in the statehouse could still be an obstacle to implementation.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and historic levels of unemployment, Illinois cannabis retailers saw record-breaking sales in June, taking in nearly $48 million in revenues.

Cannabis advocates across the United States and the world bid a grateful farewell to Lester Grinspoon, the Harvard psychiatrist and prolific author who probably did more than any other individual to change the national conversation about marijuana, stressing the need for a more tolerant and enlightened policy.

A month into the national uprising sparked by the killing of George Floyd, cities and states are responding to activist demands to defund police forces. Some are deciding that cannabis enforcement is the place to start in contracting the police apparatus.

Protests have spread across the country in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police—a haunting crystallization of institutionalized racism in law enforcement. The protests have been punctuated by looting in many cities, and cannabis businesses have not been spared. How the industry reacts at this moment will reveal much about the soul of America's cannabis community.

As first reported by Buzzfeed News, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is expanding its powers so that it can assist "to the maximum extent possible in the federal law enforcement response" to the wave of ongoing nationwide protests that have followed the killing of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis police.