Global Ganja Report

Despite repeated pledges by the New York Police Department and Mayor Bill de Blasio to lift the police pressure on cannabis, and especially to address the long-standing racial disparity in pot busts, all too little seems to be changing in Gotham. In a sometimes heated session, New York's City Council held hearings Feb. 26 to discuss new stats showing that despite a significant drop in cannabis arrests, the overwhelming majority of those busted remain Black and Latino.

A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Feb. 26 dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Schedule I classification for cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act. Judge Alvin Hellerstein granted the government's motion to dismiss because the plaintiffs failed to exhaust all administrative remedies prior to initiating the suit. The "exhaustion rule" requires "that parties exhaust prescribed administrative remedies before seeking relief from federal courts."

A recent court decision regarding a seemingly prosaic controversy over the zoning of medical marijuana businesses in Detroit actually sheds light on issues of what some activists are calling "cannabis equity"—how questions of social and racial justice related to the war on drugs will be addressed as the industry is day-lighted.

Longtime California cannabis crusader Dennis Peron, who probably did more than any other one human being to bring about legalization of medical marijuana, died Jan. 27 at a San Francisco veteran's hospital, following a battle with lung cancer. He was 72. Peron was the prime mover behind San Francisco's Proposition P, the 1991 voter initiative that made the city the first government entity in the US to officially embrace medical marijuana, deprioritizing police enforcement for medicinal users.

So California's rebel rednecks think they're taking Humboldt County with them when they leave the state, it appears. The latest split-the-state initiative was unveiled at a Sacramento press conference Jan. 16, covered by USA Today. "The current state of California has become governed by a tyranny," the group declared. Their proposed solution is to form the state of "New California," taking most of the rural counties with them, and leaving behind the heavily urbanized coast.

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.

Dana Beal, a longtime fixture in New York City's cannabis activist scene, is once again back in the slammer. In this new misadventure Dec. 16, Beal was popped by sheriff's deputies in Northern California's Trinity County. He was reportedly pulled over near the town of Hayfork, and is currently being held in the jail at county seat Weaverville.