Global Ganja Report

A Vancouver police raid on a "harm reduction center" that was selling cannabis products raises uneasy questions about the availability of cannabis in British Columbia when Canadian legalization officially hits in next month. With only one retail outfit likely to be licensed province-wide and authorities pledging a crackdown on the old dispensaries, the ironic reality may be cannabis will initially be harder to get in BC once it is "legal."

Recent years have seen ethnic tensions in the northernmost parts of the Emerald Triangle, as Hmong growers—immigrants from the Southeast Asian nation of Laos—have established themselves in local cannabis cultivation. This has led to civil rights litigation and a polarized atmosphere in Siskiyou County. But just to the south in Trinity County, a group is working to head off tensions by helping Hmong growers negotiate the transition to licensed cultivation.

Amid the various protesters that announced plans to gather in Washington DC as Trump held his military parade on Veterans' Day weekend, a group of military vets say they will be camping out at the national offices of the Veterans Administration—to demand access to medical marijuana, as well as protest budget cuts at the agency.

Sri Lanka has announced that it will start hanging drug convicts, ending a long moratorium on executions. Leaders explicitly hope to "replicate the success" of Rodrigo Duterte's bloody anti-drug campaign in the Philippines, which has now reached the point of mass murder. And while the imminent executions are for cocaine and heroin charges, the move comes amid a widening crackdown on cannabis. Yet proposals to allow medical cultivation provide some hope for a more tolerant model.

The election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador—known by his initials AMLO—as Mexico's next president is being hailed as historic, marking the first time a candidate of the left has had his victory honored. He is pledging a new, demilitarized approach to ending the endemic narco-violence. And his newly named interior minister is a vocal supporter of cannabis legalization. Will a day-lightened cannabis sector provide a way out of Mexico's long crisis?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration's most notorious anti-cannabis hardliner, surprised advocates when he said in Congressional testimony that he believes there may be "some benefits from medical marijuana." But when pressed on whether his Justice Department would continue the Obama-era policy of not enforcing the federal marijuana laws against medical users in states where it is legal, he failed to give a straight answer.

After Jeff Sessions issued a memo urging prosecutors to seek the death penalty for those "dealing in extremely large quantities of drugs," even mainstream media outlets began raising the alarm that this could actually be used against large-scale legal cannabis cultivators in places like California. Is this threat is at all realistic?

A welcome blow is reported against the deeply ingrained stigma that attaches even to users of basically harmless drugs like cannabis that happen to be illegal. The Global Commission on Drug Policy—a body with dissident views but made up of prestigious elder statesmen and world leaders, so it can't be readily ignored—has just issued a statement calling on policymakers and the media to avoid using terms such as "drug user," "addict" and "junkie." The report includes a checklist of what terms should be eschewed or embraced to avoid language portraying people who use drugs as "physically inferior or morally flawed."