Global Ganja Report

Dasheeda Dawson is “excited to be back home.”

After a long sojourn as a cannabis patient, advocate and entrepreneur in other states, the Brooklyn native is in her home town as New York City’s first cannabis czar—officially, director of Cannabis NYC, a new office created by Mayor Eric Adams.

Small producers have long been wary of the cannabis industry coming under domination by multi-state operators with the worst practices of corporate America. But the revelations of Russian oligarch money in the coffers of leading MSO Curaleaf appear to vindicate even the most cynical observers. These follow a slew of controversies concerning product safety and labor rights at the company.

Industrial-scale illicit cannabis grow operations are being raided by police in Southern Oregon. Licit-market prices are totally depressed in Oregon, yet the illicit market continues to be evidently lucrative. What explains this contradiction, and what can be done?

Authorities in southern Oregon are making accusations of criminal labor and environmental practices by illicit cannabis growers—and carrying out militarized raids. The grim headlines are starting to make legalization in the Beaver State look like something of Pyrrhic victory.

The year 2020's record-breaking wildfires in California and other Western states have compounded the grim impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—and have similarly been politicized. Thus far, the blow they have dealt to the burgeoning cannabis industry has been well weathered. But this will clearly pose a growing challenge in the years to come—as those parts of the country where legal cannabis cultivation is most advanced are also the most vulnerable to this devastating sign of ecological disequilibrium.

Voters in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon and South Dakota passed statewide ballot measures favoring medical marijuana, adult-use cannabis legalization or hemp cultivation in the Nov. 3 elections.

Questions about road safety have been a real concern as cannabis legalization has unfolded across 11 states, with medical marijuana laws in many more. But with several years of data to analyze, a new study finds no link between these policies and traffic fatalities.

CBD products are now everywhere—health-food emporia, pharmacies, truck-stops. And pursuant to the 2018 Farm Bill, they are now legal—as long as the CBD is derived from “hemp” as opposed to what has traditionally been called “marijuana.” Hemp, as legally defined, is cannabis with under 0.3% THC—the psychoactive component of the plant, responsible for the long-stigmatized “high.”

But even the hempiest hemp—rope, not dope, as they used to say—usually has some THC.