Global Ganja Report

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.

Unprecedented hearings before a panel of nine federal judges at the Dirksen US Courthouse in Chicago opened Dec. 14, charged with determining whether there was a pattern of racial bias in sting operations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) dating back to the 1990s. The hearings were called to resolve a dozen separate cases involving more than 40 defendants. An overflow courtroom was set up to handle the crowd, Chicago Tribune reports.

New York City, despite its liberal reputation, has long been the marijuana arrest capital of the USA. So many herbal advocates were heartened by the recent poll (carried out by Emerson College on behalf of the Marijuana Policy Project and Drug Policy Alliance) finding that 62% of New York's registered voters support legalizing and taxing cannabis to help close the state's budget gap, with 28% opposed. But some activists are quick to remind us that even as the public comes around on the question, all too little has changed on the city's streets.

The wildfires devastating Northern California are obviously taking their toll on this year's cannabis harvest. And this in the critical countdown to legalization, which takes effect in Golden State in January. This even won coverage in the New York Times Oct. 13. The paper cited Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, saying that at least seven cannabis farms had been destroyed, and that he expected the number to "increase significantly" as people return to their homes.

In California's far-north Siskiyou County, where last month supervisors voted to declare a "state of emergency" over illegal marijuana cultivation, the hardline Sheriff Jon Lopey has now appealed to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions for federal aid in his war on cannabis.