Global Ganja Report

A multimedia extravaganza on the history, culture and politics of the cannabis plant opens in New York City next month.

It is certainly a propitious moment for a theatrical concert celebrating cannabis to hit New York's off-off-Broadway scene, as the Empire State this year actually legalized.

Five years in the making, Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville seeks to be didactic as well as fun, tracing the plant from its origins on the remote steppes of Central Asia straight through the hip-hop culture that animates the show.

A federal raid on a Pueblo Indian reservation in New Mexico again brings into focus the contested jurisdictional status of Native American nations where cannabis is concerned. More tribes are asserting their right to cultivation as a matter of sovereignty—despite federal intransigence.

South Dakota was one of four states that voted to legalize cannabis in November 2020. But now the state's supreme court has barred the amendment from taking effect, after a challenge brought with the support of the Republican governor—and based on narrow legalisms.

Nearly 20 states have now approved initiatives or legislation to legalize cannabis, and demands are growing to wipe out past convictions for personal possession. Authorities in some of these states have started to respond—but things are not moving fast enough for advocates of a socially just model of legalization.

In a struggling former prison town in New York state, the closed prison is being converted into a cannabis grow facility, raising hopes for an economic renaissance. Cannabis has been posed as a post-industrial future for the Hudson Valley region, but there is a particular sense of poetic justice to this case.

The VA only pledges not to cut off benefits to military veterans who use medical marijuana if they are enrolled in a state program. Those in states with no such programs remain the lurch. So vets are now speaking out in favor of pending state medical marijuana laws.

Amid continued federal intransigence on recognizing cannabis as legitimate medicine for military veterans, advocates take heart in legislation pending on Capitol Hill that would mandate that the VA study the question.

It's pretty surreal that even as a legal cannabis industry emerges on a global scale, there are still countries that impose outrageously draconian sentences for the herb—up to and including the death penalty.

The egregious case of a man sentenced to death for smuggling two pounds of cannabis into the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore has focused global attention on the disturbing reality.