Global Ganja Report

Following a campaign by local advocates, the US Virgin Islands passed a medical marijuana law that allows home cultivation for qualifying patients. Basking in victory, the territory's activists still anticipate protection of sacramental use by Rastafarians—and general legalization.

Among the current crowded field of Democratic hopefuls for the 2020 presidential race, at least a handful have progressive positions on cannabis. Among these, the most outspoken on the question has probably been Hawaii's Tulsi Gabbard—who, unfortunately, has deeply problematic stances on some other very critical issues.

In what is starting to smell like an anti-cannabis media campaign, headlines erupt this week on the possible deleterious effects of cannabis on the developing brains of young teens. Again, the accounts are one-sided—and the political assumptions behind them flawed.

Recent days have seen successive stories in the media on the supposed mental health hazards of cannabis—seeming to signal a backlash to recent gains in normalizing the plant and overcoming the stigma.

A House bill to legalize cannabis, removing it from the Controlled Substances Act and treating it like alcohol, is wryly dubbed HR 420. It isn't the first such bill in Congress—but with the recent change in House leadership, this time it may actually stand a chance of passing.

In a win both for cannabis freedom and racial justice, Vermont's top court ruled in favor of a motorist whose car was searched on the ostensible basis that a state trooper smelled pot—and the probable basis that he is African American.

The claim that cannabis causes "mental illness" rears its dubious head like clockwork every few years, and this latest round has occasioned a virtual media frenzy—a seeming backlash to the recent advances in normalization of the herb and its aficionados. Scratching the claims, however, reveals more hype than rigor.

The headlines are all too familiar ones, but this time they got very prominent play.

In Episode 24 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the historic strides toward liberation of the cannabis plant in 2018, from the fabled four corners of the Earth. Yet under capitalism, every advance also opens new contradictions.

With Trump's demands for Congressional funding to build his border wall having forced a shut-down of the federal government, a new report suggests that cannabis legalization has actually done more than security measures to reduce illegal drug flows from Mexico—and that this reality holds lessons for the immigration dilemma.