Global Ganja Report

Harborside, the San Francisco Bay Area's flagship cannabis dispensary chain, is going public on the Canadian stock exchange. Founder and chairman emeritus of the company, Steve DeAngelo, speaks with Cannabis Now about what this means for Harborside's future and the fast-evolving cannabis industry.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won praise from activists when she decried a white-dominated legal cannabis industry. As if to prove her point, the man she ousted in her 2018 Congressional run, Joe Crowley, is now joining an investment firm linked to the cannabis industry.

Northern Swan, a New York investment house specializing in the cannabis industry, just announced the appointment to two prominent political figures to its advisory board.

A group of attorneys general from 38 states and territories penned an open letter urging Capitol Hill to pass a pending bill to allow cannabis businesses access to the federal banking system.

The federal bureaucracy is starting to catch up with the law, following passage of the ground-breaking 2018 Farm Bill. The US Patent Office has issued guidelines for trademarks on CBD products, while the Agriculture Department is preparing to recognize intellectual property in hemp varieties.

A new report by the British think-tank Prohibition Partners foresees a $5.8 billion cannabis market in Asia by 2024—if the tentative seeds of liberalization now witnessed across the continent in fact bear fruit.

China's ambition to get in on the "cannabis boom," providing hemp for the global CBD market, is now making international headlines. But marijuana is more harshly proscribed in China than just about any other country in the world, and the People's Republic continues to execute thousands every year for drug crimes.

Two Israeli ex-prime ministers are now involved in the cannabis industry, and legalization became a key issue in this month's elections. But in a case of strange bedfellows, legalization was aggressively taken up as a campaign plank by the far right.

New York state's second city of Buffalo has long been a national symbol of rust-belt economic and infrastructural decay. Now urban planners have approved a massive cannabis facility backed by California capital for the city's long-inactive waterfront. Buffalo's boosters say the project could turn the Great Lakes region into a leading global hub of cannabis output.