Global Ganja Report

The global cannabis industry is increasingly dependent on factories in China's industrial zones—and fears being impacted by Trump's trade war with Beijing. Chinese pharmaceutical firms meanwhile explore potential applications of cannabis. Yet possession of herbaceous cannabis can land you before a firing squad in China. Human rights groups express alarm about the furious pace of executions in the People's Republic—outstripping the rest of the world combined. And drug offenses—including pot possession—top the country's capital crimes.

Among several cannabis-related bills that cleared California's state house before the last legislative session came to close is one that would lift the tax burden on medical marijuana providers. The bill is intended to again open space for "compassionate care," which was ironically squeezed out under California's adult-use regulation regime. 

A verdict against glyphosate producer Monsanto in a case brought by a cancer sufferer has brought world attention to the dangers of pesticides and herbicides. This is a question with implications already felt in the cannabis industry—both legal and illegal.

With the North American Free Trade Agreement under renegotiation, Mexico's former president and born-again cannabis advocate Vicente Fox is calling for the new treaty to include provisions for legal cross-border commerce in cannabis. But of course the federal governments of both the US and Mexico prohibit cannabis—despite growing demands for legalization both sides of the border.

Recent years have seen ethnic tensions in the northernmost parts of the Emerald Triangle, as Hmong growers—immigrants from the Southeast Asian nation of Laos—have established themselves in local cannabis cultivation. This has led to civil rights litigation and a polarized atmosphere in Siskiyou County. But just to the south in Trinity County, a group is working to head off tensions by helping Hmong growers negotiate the transition to licensed cultivation.

A bill that would allow use of medical marijuana products in California's schools has arrived on the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown. The legislation would address an inequity in California's medical marijuana program, and is named Jojo's Act after a South San Francisco high school student who suffers from a severe form of epilepsy.

A new product is being plugged as containing CBD derived from humulus—that is, hops, the buds used as a bittering agent in beer. Some of the media hype has implied that this novel origin gets around the US federal stricture on the cannabinoid. But experts raise a skeptical eyebrow at the claim of hops-derived CBD. And in any event, the federal stricture is on the cannabinoid itself, regardless of how it is derived. 

The bureaucracy overseeing California's cannabis industry is moving fast to facilitate insurance coverage for businesses—a question very pressing as wildfires rage through the Emerald Triangle.