Global Ganja Report

Israel is a world leader in medical marijuana and has adopted an experimental decriminalization policy. But activists are pushing to make it the world's third country to outright legalize—and are using some very audacious tactics.

Gains are reported from Massachusetts in organized labor's push to unionize the cannabis industry. But significant obstacles remain—from management roadblocking, to the ambiguous status under national labor law of an industry dealing in a federally illegal substance.

The son of late reggae legend Peter Tosh, himself a successful musical artist who recorded under the stage name Tosh 1, has died at the age of 40. He'd never fully recovered from a brutal 2017 beating in a New Jersey jail, where he was serving time on a cannabis charge.

Thailand’s medical marijuana program, after a slow and cautious start, is about to embark on commercial cultivation following cabinet approval of a proposal from the Health Ministry. Unique among such programs worldwide, the Thai framework is crafted to balance the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the country's traditional herbal medicine practitioners.

Louisiana's medical marijuana program has been stalled for years, and was strictly limited to begin with. Now, just as cannabis products are finally becoming available, a wave of progressive legislation in the Pelican State includes measures that could expand the program's scope.

A new amendment to the Defense Department budget could allow service members to use CBD products—a direct response to a move by Pentagon brass to explicitly restrict all cannabis derivatives.

Amid national outrage over racial injustice, a Black disabled vet was sentenced to five years for cannabis that he uses medicinally in Alabama. A medical marijuana bill in the state seemed likely to pass this year, but was aborted when the legislature was shut down by the COVID-19 crisis. Alabama continues to have some of the harshest cannabis laws in the country.

As New Jersey awaits a November ballot initiative on legalization, the state's governor invoked cannabis as a potential key to post-pandemic economic recovery, as well as an imperative for racial justice. But even if the vote passes, deadlock in the statehouse could still be an obstacle to implementation.