Environmental impacts are rarely taken into account in the cannabis regulation debate. The assumption is that legal regulation would automatically reduce the negative environmental consequences of the unregulated illegal market, because authorities would compel the industry to comply with basic environmental standards. Practices in North America and the direction of the emerging regulation debate in Germany and other European countries, however, reveal a disturbing trend towards indoor cannabis cultivation. The high carbon footprint of indoor grow facilities could jeopardize policy aims to reduce energy use and to meet climate goals.

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Imagine that you run a perfectly legal business but are unable to open a simple checking account at a national bank. Believe it or not, that’s the case right now for anyone licensed to sell cannabis in the US. Given the size of the cannabis industry, it’s pretty shocking. But it may be about to change. In the US, 38 states have legalized marijuana for medical use and 23 of them have legalized it for recreational purposes, including three territories and the District of Columbia. An additional eight states have decriminalized its use. Both red and blue states with legalized marijuana laws have collected $15bn in tax revenue between 2014 and 2022, with $3.77bn in tax revenue attributed to 2022 alone.

The rally at the state capitol on April 20, the unofficial holiday for pot aficionados, brought out green-wigged supporters ringed in wisps of smoke. These days, they are far from the only people advocating for the legalization of marijuana. Black Lives Matter activists, who are seeking business opportunities for minority communities and say they have been hit hard by drug laws, joined the Hartford rally, as did labor organizers who want to see the industry unionized. More broadly, cannabis companies, banks and new marijuana trade organizations are deploying platoons of lobbyists to state capitals and Washington, D.C., to help shape the ground rules for the industry as more states legalize use, and as Congress weighs measures that could further legitimize the market.

According to cannabis industry analytics firm Headset, pot sales in the United States spiked in mid-March, with sales growth peaking at 64% in the week ended March 16 — the highest growth rate since at least the beginning of 2019. But after people had apparently replenished their stockpiles for fear dispensaries might be closed amid virus shutdowns, sales decelerated during the last two weeks of the month to the "mid- to high-single-digit range," the Headset analysts said. In the course of April, most US federal states surprisingly declared cannabis an "essential good" like groceries, allowing pot dispensaries to offer curbside delivery. In Germany efforts to ensure a high-quality domestic supply, means the country is now aiming for the first local cannabis harvest by the end of this year.

For the first time in history, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to both validate and protect the burgeoning cannabis industry by giving it access to banks, credit unions and insurance companies. The SAFE Banking Act, which easily cleared the House with a 301-123 vote but still has to clear the U.S. Senate before passing into law, would allow financial institutions to work with cannabis companies without fearing retribution. It’s still currently possible under federal law to prosecute banks for doing so; punishments can even include stripping them of deposit insurance. (See also:  How the U.S. cannabis banking bill could hurt Canadian exchanges)

Business and advocates both play a key role in furthering marijuana legalization, but finding the ideal balance is proving difficult. That was particularly evident with Ohio’s ill-fated legalization measure, which seemed to shove aside the wants and needs of traditional advocates and marijuana supporters in favor of big businesses and investors. The issue resurfaced again last week when a former Marijuana Policy Project official pegged the industry’s growing influence on legalization efforts as a reason for his departure from the influential organization. (Netflix Co-Founder Mitch Lowe: Who’s Driving the $60 Billion Cannabis Market Revolution?)

Wholesale cannabis prices could hit as low as $30 an ounce in some parts of the U.S. as another record crop of outdoor cannabis floods markets and sinks prices. The legal recreational market in Oregon continues to drown in a multi-year surplus. Oregon produced 10 times the cannabis it needs each year, and approximately 825,000 pounds of unsold dried wholesale flower now sits in the state’s tracking system, says Jonathan Rubin, CEO of Cannabis Benchmarks, which tracks wholesale prices. The trends point to what many people expected: a segmentation of the flower market into commodity products and, importantly, premium craft products that consumers will pay top dollar for at retail.

In a new report, Ending the U.S. government’s war on medical marijuana research, researchers at the Brookings Institution call on the federal government to eliminate roadblocks to medical marijuana research in the U.S. "The federal government is stifling medical research in a rapidly transforming area of public policy that has consequences for public health and public safety," authors John Hudak and Grace Wallack, say. "Statutory, regulatory, bureaucratic, and cultural barriers have paralyzed science and threatened the integrity of research freedom in this area."

A new analysis of cannabis research funding in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom has found that $1.56 billion was directed to the topic between 2000 and 2018—with about half of the money spent on understanding the potential harms of the recreational drug. Just over $1 billion came from the biggest funder, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which doled out far more money to research cannabis misuse and its negative effects than on using cannabis as a therapeutic drug. However, overall cannabis research funding in the United States is rising steadily, from less than $30.2 million in 2000 to more than $143 million in 2018, and money to explore cannabis medical treatments is growing—although not as fast as funding for research on harms.

Rates of cannabis use disorder have risen in U.S. states where the drug has been legalized, including among children and teenagers, according to a study. The authors of the research published in the journal JAMA Psychiatryargued that while the policies have provided "important social benefits, particularly around issues of equity in criminal justice," the climb in conditions like cannabis use disorder are "a potential public health concern." "Given our findings on problematic use across age groups, legalization efforts should coincide with prevention and treatment." (See also: A new study found marijuana legalization leads to more problematic use |Study finds declining trend in prevalence of cannabis use disorder among frequent users)

For the first time ever, Congress has weighed in on the issue of safe consumption sites (SCS). A bill tied to the stimulus package signed into law on December 27 included a direction to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to release a report on the potential public health impact of SCS. The direction was handed down in a report by the House Committee on Appropriations that accompanied HR 7614. According to the report, the NIDA and CDC must provide Congress with “an updated literature review and evaluation of the potential public health impact of Overdose Prevention Centers in the US” before the end of June 2021.

In the context of a fast changing and well documented market in legal highs, the case of khat (Catha edulis) provides an interesting anomaly. It is first of all a plant-based substance that undergoes minimal transformation or processing in the journey from farm to market. Secondly, khat has been consumed for hundreds if not thousands of years in the highlands of Eastern Africa and Southern Arabia. In European countries, khat use was first observed during the 1980s, but has only attracted wider attention in recent years.

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Persverklaring (PDF in Dutch)

Cities seeking to open sites where illegal drug users are monitored to prevent overdoses responded defiantly to a Justice Department threat to take “swift and aggressive action” against that approach to the nationwide opioid epidemic. Plans for those “supervised injection sites” — under consideration in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle and elsewhere — collided with a stern Justice Department warning issued, threatening to create a standoff between federal and local authorities like the confrontation over “sanctuary cities.” As they have before, some liberal-leaning cities trying to cope with conditions on their streets find themselves at odds with more-restrictive Trump-era policy and enforcement.

In parts of the country hit hard by addiction, some public health officials are considering running sites where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs under medical supervision. Advocates say supervised injection sites save lives that would otherwise be lost to overdoses and provide a bridge to treatment. There are at least 13 efforts underway in U.S. cities and states to start an official supervised injection site. But many safe injection site proposals seem to be waylaid in community debate and legal uncertainty. Officials with the Justice Department offer a statement issued late last year by a U.S. attorney in Vermont saying health workers at a supervised injection site would be vulnerable to criminal charges and the property could be at risk of being seized by federal law enforcement.

Después de seis años, el Gobierno celebró el quiebre de la tendencia al alza de los cultivos ilícitos en el país. En 2018 se registraron 169.000 hectáreas sembradas, mientras que en 2019 hubo 154.000, según el reporte de Naciones Unidas publicado hace tres semanas. El presidente Iván Duque tomó la noticia como un espaldarazo a la política Ruta Futuro, su apuesta de lucha antidrogas. SEMANA habló con ocho fuentes que conocen de cerca la erradicación, y que han participado en esta desde altos cargos en el Ministerio de Justicia, el Ejército y las Naciones Unidas. Todos coincidieron en que la cifra de erradicación forzada es exagerada y que alteraciones en los reportes se vienen haciendo desde hace al menos diez años. 

It was eight years ago the last time planes came to spray poison on Noralba Quintero’s coca crop in the jungled foothills here by the mighty Magdalena River. Until recently, she thought those days were over. Quintero’s community was one of thousands that relied on the plant from which cocaine is made to survive through Colombia’s decades-long civil war. With the historic peace accord of 2016, the government was supposed to help the farmers transition to legal agriculture. But that pledge remains unfulfilled — and coca has proliferated. Now President Iván Duque, pressured by the United States, is pushing hard to resume aerial fumigation with glyphosate, the controversial practice that officials here say is the most effective way of eradicating the illicit crop that helped fund the war.

El presidente de Colombia, Gustavo Petro, está empeñado en transformar la política contra las drogas ilícitas. En las dos semanas que lleva gobernando ha enfatizado en dejar de criminalizar a los eslabones más vulnerables de la cadena, los cultivadores de coca, y enfocar los esfuerzos en cerrarle el paso a las organizaciones criminales en las etapas más rentables del negocio. Eso no significa, por lo menos por ahora, una ruptura completa con los aliados ni un cambio inmediato de paradigma: una delegación de Estados Unidos, con la que se reunió este martes en la Casa de Nariño, ratificó que la estrategia antinarcóticos sigue estando en la agenda común.

The Colombian government has published a proposed law that will allow it to resume a controversial program of aerial fumigation of coca crops using glyphosate, a weed-killer thought to cause cancer in people exposed to it regularly and in high doses. The plans are in the final stage of their passage to law, and spraying is expected to begin “in the second half of this year,” said Ricardo Vargas, an expert in crop fumigation and coca at National University of Colombia. Communities have not had the help they needed to move away from the coca trade and now will take the brunt of the new spraying program. “Many social leaders, some of whom have been for promoting the substitution of coca, have been threatened or killed.”

Desde finales del año pasado, nueve aviones apaga incendios AT-802 se desplegaron por todo el país. Pedro Arenas teme que vuelvan a volar: "Asumo que podría ser en los próximos meses." El objetivo de los aviones no es extinguir los incendios, sino eliminar un problema que ha estado causando derramamiento de sangre en Colombia durante décadas: la cocaína. Los aviones están llenos del controvertido herbicida glifosato, del que se disponen 800 barriles, según los medios colombianos. Si se reanudan las fumigaciones, "la gente de las comunidades remotas perderá completamente la fe en las instituciones y en el Acuerdo de Paz", dijo Arenas. (Véase también: El ‘déja vú’ de las fumigaciones con glifosato en Colombia)