Global Ganja Report

The arrival of a major US multi-state operator in Bangkok is a sign of the global cannabis industry's big ambitions for Thailand, the first Asian country to decriminalize. But with enabling legislation still pending, the regulatory environment remains uncertain.

It’s a fairly open secret that Brittney Griner was Putin’s geopolitical pawn when she was in Russian detention for nine months on a minor cannabis charge. And her freedom came at a high price—swapped for a Russian “Death Merchant” who now boasts he’ll aid Putin’s savage war in Ukraine. But GOP exploitation of Griner indicates that she remains a political pawn even as a free woman in America.

US Olympic gold-medalist Brittney Griner, held in a Russian jail since February, is finally going before a judge. But the trial is looking more and more like a political show.

The odds for justice in Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russia are already slim—and especially, we may assume, for a dreadlocked African American icon of the international LGBTQ community. But the war in Ukraine and the geopolitical rivalry between Moscow and Washington are now explicitly at play in the case of Brittney Griner.

The cannabis industry is globalizing fast, which means changes for mainstays of commercial production in Europe and North America, and new players coming on line from regions such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central America. Here’s a brief overview of a few entries from these categories.

There is jubilation among cannabis advocates in Thailand after authorities announced a change to the narcotics code allowing personal cultivation—a breakthrough for the Asian continent. But does the reform really presage full legalization?

Thailand’s medical marijuana program, after a slow and cautious start, is about to embark on commercial cultivation following cabinet approval of a proposal from the Health Ministry. Unique among such programs worldwide, the Thai framework is crafted to balance the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the country's traditional herbal medicine practitioners.

Things have moved slowly in authoritarian Thailand since passage of a medical marijuana law last year. But now one of the country's leading universities is launching a "Ganja Studies Department," and attendant research facility. With plans to train a new generation of cultivators and entrepreneurs, the crafters of the program are voicing aspirations to make Thailand Asia's cannabis leader.

A new report by the British think-tank Prohibition Partners foresees a $5.8 billion cannabis market in Asia by 2024—if the tentative seeds of liberalization now witnessed across the continent in fact bear fruit.