Global Ganja Report

The Republic of Ireland's long-promised medical marijuana law is being held up in the country's parliament, the Dáil—leading patients who have been waiting for legal herbal treatment in their own country to charge "betrayal." That was the exact word used by Irish mom Vera Twomey, speaking from the Netherlands, where she was seeking cannabis care for her daughter Ava, 9, an epilepsy sufferer. "What issue is more important than people all over the country in chronic pain?" she rhetorically asked Ireland's national broadcaster RTÉ, according to the Irish Times of July 13.

Cuba is opening up its economy to private busineses and foreign investors, hoping for an end to the US embargo, and attracting record numbers of internaitonal tourists. But the new open atmosphere is definitely not extending to cannabis. In announcing a big increase in interceptions of illegal drugs this year, the nation's drug czar just took an open swipe at other Latin American countries that are embracing legalization, decriminalization or medical marijuana.

Three of the Balkan states to emerge from the ashes of Yugoslavia a generation ago are now among the first countries in the ex-communist world to move toward embrace of medical marijuana.

The First Argentine Congress on Cannabis and Health was held last week at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), bringing together academics, activists, cultivators and patients from across the Southern Cone country. The focus was on expanding the extremely limited medical marijuana law passed in Argentina earlier this year. At the opening ceremony, held in an auditorium within La Plata's provinicial legislature building, UNLP president Raúl Perdomo pledged to "work to make the regulations for the recently approved law include the national universities in cultivation and research."

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called on congressional leaders to overturn federal protections on medical marijuana that have been in place since 2014, according to a May letter that the Washington Post published June 13. The letter, addressed to the Senate majority and minority leaders as well as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, called for repeal of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which bars the Justice Department from using federal funds to prevent named states "from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana."

Portending an unprecedented showdown with federal power, California's State Assembly on June 1 approved a bill that would bar state and local law police from cooperating with the DEA and other federal agencies in cannabis enforcement efforts, unless compelled to do so by a court order. "Prohibiting our state and local law enforcement agencies from expending resources to assist federal intrusion of California-compliant cannabis activity reinforces...the will of our state's voters who overwhelmingly supported Proposition 64,” Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), lead author of the bill, told the Los Angeles Times when it was still pending.

Oops, he did it again. Acting Drug Enforcement Administration chief Chuck Rosenberg reiterated his oft-voiced opinion on May 25 that "marijuana is not medicine." The Washington Examiner reports that he told an audience at a clinic in Cleveland: "If it turns out that there is something in smoked marijuana that helps people, that's awesome. I will be the last person to stand in the way of that... But let's run it through the Food and Drug Administration process, and let's stick to the science on it."

Florida is rapidly shaping up as a test case in whether the term "medical marijuana" necessarily has to include actual herbaceous cannabis. On May 15, the state's  Health Department ordered Quincy-based Trulieve dispensary to stop selling a "whole flower" product—officially intended for use in vaporizers but which can of course also be smoked. Trulieve just last week began sales of product dubbed “Entourage,”—named for the so-called "entourage effect," the synergistic workings of the various compounds in the actual cannabis flower. product meant to be used in the Volcano vaporizer, last week, reports Orlando Weekly. The Health Department's cease-and-desist letter came after local media reports about the sales of Entourage.