Global Ganja Report

Peter Gorman, the acclaimed journalist, naturalist and adventurer who aggressively covered cannabis and the drug war beat for over 30 years, died at his home in Texas on April 24 at the age of 71. He had just returned from a long-planned river journey into a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon that he had first visited in 1984, and where he first encountered the psychoactive shamanic substances that would define much of his life's work.

Reggae group the Mighty Diamonds' lead singer Tabby Diamond (née Donald Shaw) was shot and killed in Jamaica in a drive-by attack on March 29. Five people were hit with two dying in the St. Andrew South area. Shaw was 67.

The Mighty Diamonds were founded in 1967, but didn't release their first album until 1976. Their best-known song, 1981's "Pass the Kouchie," is about smoking ganja. One year later, Musical Youth's cover of the song, retitled "Pass the Dutchie," was a No. 10 hit in the US.

Bunny Wailer, a founder of the reggae musical genre, died in Kingston on March 2 at the age of 73. He was the last surviving member of the original Wailers, following Bob Marley's death from cancer in 1981, and Peter Tosh's murder during a robbery in 1987.

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.

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.

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.