Doug Fine giving a talk on cannabis law reform at London South Bank University. Oh my! (Photo by Jake Lewis)

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The Anti-Drug Alliance is calling for the decriminalisation of dagga, saying money spent on criminalising it should be spent on rehabilitating drug users.

In a report, “At what cost? The futility of the war on drugs in South Africa”, released this month, the alliance’s chief executive, Quintin van Kerken, said legalising dagga would help to make the government money, as it would be able to tax it.

HANOI – For the young Vietnamese dope smokers rolling up outside a smart Hanoi cafe, local cannabis is just not good enough. As with their Adidas caps, iPhones and Sanskrit tattoos, so with their choice of bud: Only foreign will do.

Potent marijuana grown indoors in Canada and the United States is easy to buy in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, say regular smokers, and it sells for up to 10 times the price of locally grown weed. That is perhaps surprising given that marijuana is easy to cultivate regionally, and bringing drugs across continents is expensive and risky.

Israel sets a new standard for legal medical marijuana research, production and sales

Just over six years ago, in the lush Upper Galilee of northern Israel, the nation’s first large-scale harvest of legal medical marijuana was flowering on the roof deck of Tzahi Cohen’s parents’ house, perched on a cliff overlooking the bright-green farming village of Birya. Until then, fewer than 100 Israeli patients suffering from a short list of ailments had been allowed to grow the plants for themselves, but this marked the first harvest by a licensed grower.

Edmond Campbell, Senior Staff Reporter

MEMBER OF Parliament for North West St Ann, Dr Dayton Campbell, who is a medical practitioner, on Tuesday warned against the ill and wide-ranging negative effects of decriminalising marijuana, a proposal moved in a motion by his colleague Raymond Pryce.

Contributing to debate on the motion in Gordon House, Dr Campbell made it clear that as a member of the medical profession, he had a duty to put public health first.

Despite strong arguments from Pryce about acquisition of criminal records by young men for the smoking of a ganja spliff (a small portion), Dr Campbell cautioned that studies made a direct link between the smoking of cannabis and mental illness.

NINE MILE, Jamaica (AP):

Napa and Sonoma have their wine tours, and travellers flock to Scotland to sample the fine single-malt whiskies. But in Jamaica, farmers are offering a different kind of trip for a different type of connoisseur.

Call them ganja tours: smoky, mystical, and technically illegal journeys to some of the island's hidden cannabis (ganja) plantations, where pot tourists can sample such strains as 'purple kush' and 'pineapple skunk'.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — The government of Uruguay makes Scotch whisky. It also makes and sells rum, vodka and cognac, and has done so for nearly a century. Many people consider this sideline of the state to be an historical accident — a wasteful and even eccentric contradiction.

But President Jose Mujica says Uruguay's long experience at the center of the nation's liquor business makes it more than capable of dominating another substance: marijuana.

Final Senate approval of Uruguay's marijuana law is expected by late September, and the government plans to license growers, sellers and users as quickly as possible thereafter to protect them from criminal drug traffickers, said ruling party Sen. Lucia Topolansky, who is also Uruguay's first lady.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — Uruguayan President Jose Mujica plans to defend his government's groundbreaking marijuana licensing plan in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September, his spokesman said Friday.

By then, the marijuana proposal is expected to be the law in this land of 3.3 million, with bureaucrats preparing to issue the first licenses to grow, sell and smoke government-approved pot.

At least 800,000 Moroccans live off illegal marijuana cultivation, generating annual sales estimated at $10 billion, or 10 percent of the economy, according to the Moroccan Network for the Industrial and Medicinal use of Marijuana, a local charity. Photographer: Abdelhak Senna/AFP via Getty Images

Mustapha Tahiri, a cannabis farmer in northern Morocco, looks forward to the day he can sell his crop without worrying about being jailed. If lawmakers in the Islamist-led government have their way, that isn’t too far off.