Global Ganja Report

Some of her fans fondly recall that Gilligan's Island co-star Dawn Wells, who played innocent Mary Ann and passed away on Dec. 30 in Los Angeles, had been arrested for cannabis possession in 2007. Police in Idaho, where she then lived, stopped her car for swerving on the night of Wells' 69th birthday, Oct. 18, and said they detected the smell of marijuana. Four partially smoked joints were found in the car.

The son of late reggae legend Peter Tosh, himself a successful musical artist who recorded under the stage name Tosh 1, has died at the age of 40. He'd never fully recovered from a brutal 2017 beating in a New Jersey jail, where he was serving time on a cannabis charge.

Hemp’s Curious Cultural Trajectory

Now that hemp has finally arrived at its long-sought status as a legal crop and commodity, there is a sense of inevitability to its deviation from the utopian vision that animated the advocates who fought for it a generation ago.

A tension that has always existed between two currents in the subculture of hemp advocacy is increasingly weighted toward the more mundane—activists versus entrepreneurs, idealism versus pragmatism, agrarianism versus agribusiness. And finally the original paradigm of a crop with multitudinous uses as “food, fuel and fiber,” holding the potential to solve humanity’s ecological crisis, versus the hegemony of CBD.

South Africa's cannabis community is grieving and shocked after the slaying of Julian Stobbs, one of the country's frontline activists—and one half of the famous "Dagga Couple" who successfully challenged the marijuana law in the courts. Stobbs was killed in the early hours of July 3 in an apparent armed robbery at his farm outside Johannesburg.

Cannabis advocates across the United States and the world bid a grateful farewell to Lester Grinspoon, the Harvard psychiatrist and prolific author who probably did more than any other individual to change the national conversation about marijuana, stressing the need for a more tolerant and enlightened policy.

If there is one person with a claim to reviving the pharmacopoeia of cannabis in the post-prohibition age—and thereby undermining prohibition's pseudo-scientific foundations—that person was Tod Mikuriya. The Berkeley psychiatrist, who died in 2007, was hailed as the grandfather of the medical marijuana movement, backing up the activists with unimpeachable scholarly chops—to the rage of the Drug War establishment.

One longtime California cannabis activist actually has a legal standard named in her honor. Pebbles Trippet established in the state's courts that the 1996 medical marijuana law implies a right to transport cannabis—a precedent-setting case. And this was but the most notable of her many legal battles.

The legendary hemp crusader Jack Herer drew up a California ballot initiative for a cannabis economy based on maximum freedom. He did not live to see its passage. But amid growing disillusionment with the Prop 64 legalization model, his heirs believe that in 2020, his hour has posthumously arrived.