Global Ganja Report

The Trump administration has seriously turned up the heat on Venezuela, slapping sanctions on the country's vice president as a drug "kingpin." The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Feb. 13 officially named Tareck Zaidan El Aissami as a "Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker" under terms of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) of 1999. The order charges that El Aissami received pay-offs from a trafficking network linked to Mexico's Zetas narco-gang. Under the order, US nationals and corporations are barred from doing business with El Aissami, and all his assets within the country are frozen.

In a speech to police chiefs and sheriffs at the Washington DC meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association Feb. 9, Donald Trump dealt a harsh blow to any activists who may have been hoping for a tolerant stance on drugs from the United States' new president. As the conservative RedState.com blog happily headlines: "Trump Promises to Ramp Up the War on Drugs." With an almost touching innocence, it writes: "Citing his border wall as a solution along with confidence" in his Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, "Trump apparently believes he will succeed where everyone else has failed."

A corrections officer has been left dead following a nearly 20-hour stand-off and hostage crisis at a Delaware prison. The uprising was put down when state police seized control of the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna the morning of Feb. 1. Inmates took four guards hostage to protest harsh conditions at the facility, and to demand educational and other programs for prisoners. Some inmates managed to establsih phone contact with the Wilmington News Journal to state their demands. One said their reasons "for doing what we're doing" included "Donald Trump. Everything that he did. All the things that he's doing now. We know that the institution is going to change for the worse."

The planned meeting in Washington between President Trump and his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Peña Nieto, was called off after Trump signed his Jan. 25 executive order decreeing construction of a wall on the border—accompanied with more bluster about how Mexico will pay for it. Since the cancelation, Trump and Peña Nieto have engaged in an unseemly Twitter war, each taking responsibility for calling off the meeting. Things got worse when the White House raised the option of making Mexico pay for the wall with a 20% tariff on all goods coming in from our southern neighbor. The threat portends a trade war with the United States' third biggest trading partner.

Lighting up joints right on the National Mall in the middle of Donald Trump's inauguration speech struck me as the perfect way to usher in the new era. As High Times reported, the Inauguration Day smoke-in did indeed get away with it. But the real testament to cannabis' power to bring people together actually came a few hours earlier, when the DC Cannabis Coalition gathered in Dupont Circle, about a mile from the mall, for their mass joint give-away.

The US Justice Department on Jan. 13 issued a report charging the Chicago Police Department with a pattern of civil rights abuses. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the federal probe, covering the period from 2012 to 2016, found that the Chicago police force "engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force that violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution." The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure.

The Hawaii chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on Jan. 10 filed a complaint with the US Justice Department, demanding an investigation into the state's dangerously overcrowded prisons and jails. The complaint charges that horrific conditions at the facilities constitute a violation of the prisoners' Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. "What you have is cells that were designed for two inmates that now are housing four or five inmates," said Mateo Caballero, legal director for the Hawaii ACLU. "You have inmates sleeping on the floor next to leaky faucets or toilets. The conditions of jails and prisons in Hawaii have not improved in the last 30 years."

After the first day of Senate confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions, president-elect Trump's choice to lead the US Justice Department, cannabis advocates are parsing his testimony for clues as to what the incoming administration's stance will be on whether to continue to give breathing room to state-level legalization and medical marijuana laws. The Los Angeles Times takes an ominous view, writing in a headline: "Sessions leaves door open to reviving federal war on pot."