Global Ganja Report

For those, such as myself, who came of age in the prohibition era, it was a tad surreal to see the giant electronic billboard overlooking Manhattan’s Times Square (focal point of the world-famous New Years Eve countdown) displaying a “countdown to 420” promoted by a leading brand of rolling papers. But that is what gathered revelers witnessed in the minutes leading up to 4:20 PM on the afternoon of Sunday, April 20.

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. 

In the big — and, in nearly half of US states now, successful — drive to legalize cannabis, two major arguments have been brought to bear. First, that public oversight of a legal industry will assure transparency and standards for quality. And secondly, that a taxed industry will be a boon to state and local economies.

But now a disturbing new study from an industry advocacy group in California indicates that the legal cannabis sector faces a challenge in the proliferation of ostensibly legal but in fact unregulated psychoactive “hemp” products.

President Donald Trump has appointed veteran DEA agent Derek Maltz as acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Maltz is a notorious old-school hardliner where cannabis is concerned. In an interview last year, he recycled the discredited notion that cannabis is a "gateway drug" that leads to mental health problems. Maltz has previously linked the plant to school shootings. 

Election day, Nov. 5, saw the defeat of ballot measures to legalize cannabis in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota. In Florida, the measure actually received upwards of 1.2 million more "yes" than "no" votes. However, because of unique rules in Florida, the constitutional amendment required support from a supermajority (60%) of voters, and it did not meet that threshold. The amendment was publicly opposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who spent millions of dollars on taxpayer-funded messaging and made several unfounded claims against the initiative.

Those stigmatized as “drug dealers” can be good people too seems to be the overarching message in A Weed Grows in Boston by Valerie Vande Panne. The slim volume is a reproduction of a news story that originally ran in 2009 in the Boston Phoenix, which received both an AltWeekly award and a New England Newspaper & Press Association award. The author is former news editor for High Times, yet she is amusingly shocked by how ordinary is “Mary Jones” (the pseudonym given to the subject).

In Episode 233 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg recalls his days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s. A remnant faction of the 1960s counterculture group adopted a punk aesthetic for the Reagan era, launched the US branch of the Rock Against Racism movement, brought chaos to the streets at Republican and Democratic political conventions, defied the police in open cannabis "smoke-ins"—and won a landmark Supreme Court ruling for free speech. The Yippie clubhouse at 9 Bleecker Street, the hub for all these activities, has long since succumbed to the gentrification of the East Village, but it survived long enough to provide inspiration to a new generation of radical youth during Occupy Wall Street. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.