Global Ganja Report

The Philippines' notoriously ultra-hardline President Rodrigo Duterte won rare favorable international headlines Oct. 12, when he said he would pull his National Police force out of his brutal "war on drugs," which has now reached the point of mass murder, with an estimated 8,000 slain since he took office last year. The move came in response to a wave of public outrage after the police slaying of an unarmed youth in the working-class Manila suburb of Caloocan City in August.

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.

A cannabis "shatter" production lab in England's North East, said to be the first of its kind in the post-industrial region, was busted Oct. 12 in a paramilitary-style raid by the Northumbria Police. Local media show a squad of cops in full body armor breaking down the door and smashing the windows of a local property with buzz-saws, battering rams and pick-axes. Two arrests were made in the raid on the Croft Estate housing project in the town of Gateshead, just across the River Tyne from the historic city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. An unspecified number of plants as well as butane and other equipment were seized.

The latest grim manifestation of the unrelenting prison crisis in Latin America comes from the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León, where authorities confirmed Oct. 10 that 16 inmates were killed, and 25 wounded, in an uprising at the Penal de Cadereyta facility.

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.

In the long string of Mexican journalists assassinated for covering police abuse and narco-corruption, the latest case is particularly egregious. On Oct. 6, authorities in San Luis Potosí found the body of Edgar Daniel Esqueda Castro outside the city's airport, dead of three gunshot wounds. He had been abducted by armed men in police unforms the previous night.

Both the absurdity of the war on drugs and the depravity of the current administration in Washington are illustrated by the maddening case of Alvin Queen, an internationally acclaimed jazz drummer who was denied entry to the US due to a minor drug arrest when he was still a teen—despite the fact that he was born in the country!

Some 15 civilians were killed and more than 50 were injured when Colombian security forces opened fire during coca eradication operations in a hotly contested incident Oct. 5. Local cocaleros say a mixed force of army and National Police troops fired "indiscriminately" into a crowd of peaceful protesters, in what they are calling a "massacre."  Police and military officials claim they fired in response to an attack by remnant FARC guerillas under a renegade commander who goes by the alias "Guacho."