For the Culture By The Culture
The Omaha Tribe legalized cannabis and created its own governing body to regulate cultivation, licensing, and sales. Meanwhile, Nebraska still criminalizes flower. This is a story about sovereignty, survival, and state resistance. The border is more than a line. It is a trap. Cross it with weed and you're no longer legal.
Michigan’s new 24 percent wholesale cannabis tax is being sold as a road repair plan but looks more like a cash grab. Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s law faces a constitutional challenge from the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, while NORML’s Paul Armentano warns that greedy taxation drives consumers back underground and destroys legal markets that voters fought to build. The weed war is back this time in a budget.
Despite legalization in half the country, over 204,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana in 2024, most for possession. The FBI, ACLU, and DOJ data expose how outdated laws, racial disparities, and political hypocrisy keep the drug war alive under new names. America claims reform, yet still profits from punishment. The hustle just wears a badge now.
The Netherlands is finally confronting its cannabis hypocrisy. After decades of letting coffee shops sell weed sourced from the black market, the Dutch government is expanding a state-run program that licenses legal growers. The plan could eliminate contamination, crush the illicit trade, and restore integrity to the nation that once sold the world on tolerance but never practiced it.
A hundred years after the 1925 International Opium Convention first outlawed cannabis, prohibition still stands as one of the biggest policy failures in modern history. From colonial fear and racist propaganda to Nixon’s drug war and global treaties, the cost has been human lives, stolen freedom, and wasted truth. The plant survived. The lies didn’t.
Hawaii sells itself as paradise, but when it comes to cannabis, the islands are locked in prohibition. Lawmakers have teased legalization for decades, only to betray voters and bow to cops, lobbyists, and fear. With over 70% of Hawaiians supporting legalization, the hypocrisy is glaring. Paradise is freedom, yet a joint in Waikīkī can still mean court.
