Global Ganja Report

At the annual Vienna meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the governing body of the UN Office on Drugs & Crime (UNODC) voted Dec. 2 to strike cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the global treaty regulating drug control 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.

The global prohibition of cannabis affords the opportunity for imperial powers and authoritarian regimes to exploit those caught in the web of enforcement to advance their own political agendas. The recent case of Naama Issachar was deftly leveraged by Vladimir Putin, and could encourage other depots to similarly use pot prisoners to exact concessions from foreign governments.

Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has won support from many activists for her embrace of cannabis legalization (as well as her anti-war rhetoric). Gabbard has been more fearless in her disregard of the cannabis stigma than any of the others in the Democratic field.

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.

An international network of non-governmental organizations has submitted a "shadow report" to the United Nations, calling the war on drugs a "spectacular failure"—and calling on the world's governments to reconsider it. The report takes heart from the growing official tolerance of cannabis in several countries around the world, but warns of escalating and horrific repression in the name of drug enforcement in several others. Will the UN take heed when it revisits the question of drug policy in 2019?

A new product is being plugged as containing CBD derived from humulus—that is, hops, the buds used as a bittering agent in beer. Some of the media hype has implied that this novel origin gets around the US federal stricture on the cannabinoid. But experts raise a skeptical eyebrow at the claim of hops-derived CBD. And in any event, the federal stricture is on the cannabinoid itself, regardless of how it is derived. 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions' newly announced Religious Liberty Task Force has progressives fearing the worst. But might it open political space to argue for a right to sacramental use of cannabis?