Global Ganja Report

In response to the growing tensions between the Trump White House and Colombia, the South American nation's President Gustavo Petro called for replacing the policy of marijuana prohibition with a regulatory framework allowing for adult use and international export of cannabis, like "any good."

Industrial-scale illicit cannabis grow operations are being raided by police in Southern Oregon. Licit-market prices are totally depressed in Oregon, yet the illicit market continues to be evidently lucrative. What explains this contradiction, and what can be done?

Colombia is at a crossroads with the historic election of the left-populist Gustavo Petro as president. But will he be able to close the country’s cannabis gap? Big Bud is booming, while small peasant producers face continued eradication.

Authorities in southern Oregon are making accusations of criminal labor and environmental practices by illicit cannabis growers—and carrying out militarized raids. The grim headlines are starting to make legalization in the Beaver State look like something of Pyrrhic victory.

Two years and counting after Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the country’s Congress to legalize cannabis, the high court justices ran out of patience with the legislative paralysis and issued a new ruling — this one removing penalties for personal use by judicial decree.

But there is no provision for commercial production, and the decree calls for tight federal regulation even of personal possession and cultivation. Will this move prove to be at least a beginning in the daunting challenge of ending Mexico’s long and bloody narco-nightmare?

Veteran war photographer Teun Voeten has worked in conflict zones from Afghanistan and Iraq to Rwanda and Sierra Leone, to Haiti, Nicaragua and Colombia. Now he makes the leap into academia, with his newly published doctoral thesis, Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty. Voeten attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the unrelenting cartel wars that may now threaten an actual collapse of the government in the United States' southern neighbor.

Mexico's President Lopez Obrador met with Trump at the White House this week to inaugurate the new trade treaty that replaces NAFTA. Embarrassingly, the meeting was punctuated by horrific new outbursts of narco-violence in Mexico. And the country's promised cannabis legalization—mandated by the high court and looked to as a de-escalation of the dystopian drug war—is stalled by a paralyzed Congress. 

Mexican lawmakers are predicting legal cannabis by month's end, and portraying it as a key to de-escalating the endemic narco-violence. But national headlines are full of nightmarish cartel violence—making all too clear how big the challenge will be.