Global Ganja Report

Oxford University scholar Maziyar Ghiabi has a startling piece in Britain's The Conversation website (reprinted in The Independent) asserting that Iran's leaders are considering legalization of cannabis and opium. The Islamic Republic certainly lives up to its rep as a puritanical police state. Ghiabi admits that up to 70% of its inmates are charged with drug-related offenses (out of a total prison population of some 225,000, according to the World Prison Brief website). We've also noted a recent surge in executions in Iran, contributing to a global spike in death penalty use over the past two years. As Ghiabi writes: "Drug traffickers risk harsh punishments that include the death penalty." But he also tells us that Iran is now pursuing the kind of harm reduction policies that actvists have long pressed for in the US, including "distribution of clean needles to injecting drug users, methadone substitution programmes (also in prisons) and a vast system of addiction treatment."

Cannabis legalization proponents in Canada are rejoicing in the wake of the Oct. 19 elections that gave the Liberal Party a clear majority and position its leader Justin Trudeau to become prime minister. The son of Canada's revered former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin openly advocates legalization. He even admitted to Huffington Post in 2013 that he had toked since becoming an MP representing Montreal in 2008.  He also revealed that his late brother, Michel Trudeau, was facing cannabis possession charges before his death in an avalanche in 1998, and that the experience influenced his position. In vivid contrast the Conservative Party's incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been leading a crackdown on Canada's medical marijuana program, and even recently called cannabis "infinitely worse" than tobacco. But how easy will it be for Trudeau to follow through on his promise to legalize?

Here we go again. The Weed Blog was last week the latest to repeat the urban legend that cannabis is legal in North Korea. Earlier this year, the same click-bait nonsense was heard on a YouTube video produced by TopTrending.com. The mis-informed line goes like this (in the Weed Blog's gushy prose): "North Korea doesn’t consider marijuana a drug at all, and is completely legal in the country. [Sic] That's right. I can repeat that: marijuana is completely legal in the country of North Korea." You can repeat it all you want, but that doesn't make it true. It's an absurd irony that probably the most cannabis-unfriendly country on Earth has won a rep as a free zone where the stuff is legal. How did this all get started?

Mexican federal police agents on Oct. 1 announced the discovery of some 860,000 cannabis plants, weighing an estimated 1,000 metric tons, at Eijido La Sangre, an agricultural community in Tubutama municipality, Sonora state, about 10 miles south of the Arizona border. The plants were burned in the 14-hectare irrigated field, police said. No arrests were reported. Fertilizer, pesticides and farm equipment were confiscated. Authorities of the ejido are said to be under investigation. (EFE, Oct. 1)

Vancouver's BC Compassion Club Society is waiting for clarification from Canada's federal government following a threat to call in the RCMP unless it closes its doors—along with 12 other area cannabis dispensaries. John Conroy,  the Compassion Club's attorney, told local News 1130 that he wrote back to Health Canada after they received the threatening letter last month. Conroy raised the specter of the Mounties confiscating herbal medicine, leaving wheelchair-bound patients no option but to return to more debilitating painkillers they'd been taking before cannabis became available. "A lot of these folks used to be on all kinds of prescribed opiates," he said. "Many of them are now not on any opiates and doing much better." Vancouver recently became the first Canadian city to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries, which remain officially barred under federal law. The city now has about 80 such operations, with the Compassion Club the flagship outfit.

Uruguay's government announced Oct. 1 the granting of licenses to two companies to grow cannabis for commercial distribution. Juan Andrés Roballo, head of the National Drug Board, said the two companies chosen out of 22 applicants were Symbiosys and Iccorp, both start-ups financed by Uruguayan and foreign capital. They will each be allowed to produce two metric tons of cannabis yearly—with the plantations to be guarded by government troops. Uruguayans will be able to purchase 10 grams (about a third of an ounce) weekly. Roballo told reporters that cannabis will go on sale in the country's  pharmacies "in no less than eight months from now."

In a move that raises questions over the rights and limits of tribal sovereignty, Mendocino County sheriff's deputies on Sept. 22 raided a medical marijuana grow operation on Indian land just outside Ukiah—targeting a project hailed as a new economic model for cash-strapped tribes. Some 400 outdoor plants were eradicated on lands of the Pinoleville Pomo Nation. Deputies also seized more than 100 pounds of trimmed and drying bud at a Ukiah laboratory run by the tribe where cannabis-infused honey oil was being produced.

On two separate occasions last week, agents of Pakistan's Anti Narcotics Force raided the offices of another elite police division, the Anti Violent Crime Cell, in the port city of Karachi—seizing large quantities of hashish and heroin. First, Dunya News reported that on Sept. 16, ANF agents arrested an AVCC agent at his office, and confiscated 137 kilograms of hashish. A drug suspect who was said to have been "illegally detained" by the AVCC was also found at the office, and presumably released. The next day, Daily Pakistan reported that the ANF again raided an AVCC office in the city, this time recovering 66 kilograms of hashish and two kilos of heroin.