Global Ganja Report

Veteran Yippie activist and cannabis crusader Ben Masel died April 27 at his home in Madison, Wisc. He had been suffering from terminal lung cancer. Known for founding the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival, the Bronx-born Masel moved to Madison in 1971 and was a fixture in politics there ever since. He frequently ran for public office—including sheriff of Dane County—on a pro-legalization platform, and sometimes on the Republican ticket, just to tweak the local GOP establishment.

Country music legend Willie Nelson has come out for Proposition 19, the California initiative that would tax and regulate cannabis. Asked by Mary Otte of High Times his opinion on the measure, Willie recently responded:

Makeda Jahnesta Marley, 29, the youngest among the late reggae superstar Bob Marley's 13 acknowledged children, admitted to having nearly a dozen large marijuana plants inside her home west of Philadelphia, Pa. She was arrested in 2008 after police say they found her removing plants from the basement when officers arrived on a domestic dispute call.

Counterculture legend Tuli Kupferberg, co-founder of The Fugs and self-described "world’s oldest rock star," died July 12 in Manhattan at the age of 86. He had been in poor health since suffering two strokes last year, said Ed Sanders, his longtime friend and fellow Fug.

Peter Orlovsky, longtime partner of Allen Ginsberg and a renowned poet and counterculture figure in his own right, died May 30 in Vermont of lung cancer. He was 76.

The Los Angeles Times recalls that Orlovsky met Ginsberg in San Francisco in 1954, just before Ginsberg wrote his seminal poem, "Howl," which was the subject of a 1957 obscenity trial that became a landmark free-expression case. Ginsberg and Orlovsky later moved to Paris, where they stayed with Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and others in a boarding house that would become known as the Beat Hotel. In the early 1960s, Orlovsky and Ginsberg traveled in India together, where they both became devotees of meditation and eastern mysticism.