Global Ganja Report

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.

The global cannabis economy is now reaching Oceania, with commercial cultivation underway in Australia, a legalization referendum coming up in New Zealand, and legal barriers starting to come down in the Pacific Islands. 

A growing number of countries on the African continent are looking to cannabis as the ticket out of poverty, and foreign investment for this sector is flooding in. Activists who pushed for legal commercial cultivation will now face the challenge of crafting a cannabis economy that empowers small farmers and rural communities, rather than replicating the elitist forms of past agro-export industries.

Lockdowns and economic paralysis imposed by the COVID-19 outbreak are spurring a new emphasis on self-sufficiency. Even before the crisis, medicinal cannabis users facing shortages at local dispensaries were turning to home cultivation.

Digital technology is rapidly colonizing every sphere of human existence, and the cannabis industry is certainly no exception. Entrepreneurs are aggressively plugging the application of artificial intelligence in everything from automating grow operations to matching strains with symptoms they are effective against. But is there a downside?

Canada's largest licensed producer of cannabis, with globe-spanning operations, is shutting down two massive greenhouses in British Columbia, and laying off hundreds of workers. Industry observers call it a sign that infrastructure overshot the market in the post-legalization euphoria.

An egregious incident of police abuse in Brooklyn has gone viral on the internet—and re-ignited public anger over racist marijuana enforcement in New York City.

With the Democratic horserace having narrowed into a two-man contest, cannabis voters appear to face a clear-cut choice: Bernie Sanders supports legalization, while Joe Biden has only in recent years come to support decrim. A look at the details, however, reveals that Bernie too has compromised with the Drug War establishment in the past.