Global Ganja Report

ICE agents raided a cannabis farm in California's Ventura County July 10, sparking a clash with protesters and resulting in the death of an employee. Agents threw smoke canisters and flash-bangs into a crowd that gathered to confront them as the operation was taking place at Glass House Farms near Camarillo. A farmworker who had apparently climbed onto a roof to evade the agents fell during the chaos, and expired after two days on life support with a brain injury. Jaime Alanis, 57, is the first known person to die during one of the Trump administration's ongoing immigration enforcement operations. Similar confrontations were reported in a raid on a second Glass House Farms facility around 35 miles away in Carpinteria. ICE said that they detained 361 "illegal aliens" in the raids on the two sites. (KABC, LAT, NYT, SBI, NNN, USAT, AP)

Vietnam's National Assembly on June 25 voted overwhelmingly to abolish the death penalty for eight categories of criminal offenses: espionage, bribery, embezzlement, counterfeiting medicines, vandalism of state property, sabotage, acts aimed at overthrowing the government, and drug trafficking. The revised Criminal Code now imposes a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for these offenses. Under transitional provisions, all death sentences handed down before July 1 for these crimes will be automatically commuted to life terms.

Thailand's government on June 26 approved new measures restricting the sale of cannabis to those with a doctor's prescription, in the hope of reining in an industry that officials see as out of control. The public health ministry also says that consumption of cannabis is to be re-criminalized, although a date for that has not been set.

The US Supreme Court ruled June 12 in favor of an Atlanta family attempting to sue the federal government for damages after their home was mistakenly raided by an FBI Special Weapons & Tactics (SWAT) team.

A federal judge on May 14 stripped New York City of its control over the Rikers Island jail, which will now effectively be run by a third-party “remediation manager.” This comes after the same judge held the city in contempt last November for failing to reduce violence in the notorious jail complex.

Trump is pointing to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's tattoos to justify his indefinite detention without charge in the ultra-oppressive Salvadoran prison gulag. These notoriously include a cannabis leaf, demonstrating the continued propaganda utility of the "Reefer Madness" stigma, even as a multi-million dollar legal industry emerges. But the White House actually added the characters "MS13" (name of the notorious Salvadoran gang) to the shot of Abrego Garcia's knuckles in a crude photoshop job—despite transparent denials from Trump. Lubricating the emerging transnational mass detention program with this Orwellian post-truth stratagem, the Trump regime meanwhile moves toward actual deportation of US citizens. Bill Weinberg raises the alarm in Episode 277 of the CounterVortex podcast.

Amnesty International on April 24 expressed deep concern over a dramatic increase in executions for drug-related offenses in Saudi Arabia, stressing the fear and uncertainty faced by dozens of men currently on death row. The organization reported that Saudi authorities have executed at least 88 individuals since January, 42 for drug-related crimes, which is almost double the executions for that same period in 2024, none for drug-related crimes. Just this week, in one day on April 22, the Saudi Press Agency announced the execution of three people: two Saudi nationals for “promoting hashish,” and one Pakistani national for “trafficking heroin.” 

April 20 has become a national day of celebration for the hedonistic cannabis subculture, but it has also long been marked by the radical right and Nazi-nostalgists around the world for unsavory reasons. It now emerges that Trump's Inauguration Day executive order declaring a state of emergency on the southern border also set a deadline of April 20 for a joint Pentagon-Homeland Security recommendation on whether to invoke the Insurrection Act. This has sparked much speculation that Trump will immediately do so, declaring martial law and consolidating a dictatorship... this weekend. How likely is this, and is the date a mere coincidence? In Episode 274 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks it down.