Business
Groups Condemn Conviction of Journalists in Nigeria Over Report on Pot Use at Politicians Factory
Gidado Yushau and Alfred Olufemi, two journalists, face sketchy charges that organizations say are politically motivated.
Two organizations condemned the convictions of two journalists in Nigeria who were arrested in 2019 after they exposed pot smoking at a business associated with a high-ranking politician. While Nigeria is the world’s third-highest consumer of cannabis, according to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, the plant is illegal in the country. Some view it as a double standard for officials and commoners.
The Eagle reports that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) condemned the conviction of two young Nigerian journalists, Gidado Yushau and Alfred Olufemi over an investigative report. CPJ, an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, described the conviction as “a chilling message to the Nigerian press.” The Eagle called it an “inglorious attempt to muzzle the press and investigative journalism in Nigeria.”
Yushau serves as editor of The News Digest and is Convener of the annual Campus Journalism Awards (CJA), while Olufemi is a freelance journalist with bylines in Premium Times and Punch, two Africa-based newspapers. It’s not the publications’ first dance with danger: Premium Times, for instance, exposed crimes such as those targeting women and civilians allegedly committed by Boko Haram.
Both journalists were arrested and charged in court in 2019 after they wrote an investigative report exposing the prevalence of pot smoking by staff, a Kwara, Nigeria-based rice factory, which is associated with Hillcrest Agro-Allied Industries. Why is that significant? Hillcrest Agro-Allied Industries is linked to a high-ranking official: Presidential Economic Adviser Sarah Aladea, who formerly served as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Organization leaders worry that the arrests have a political motivation. On Feb. 7, Adams Salihu Mohammed, a magistrate in Ilorin, Nigeria, ordered the journalists to be held for five months in jail or pay a steep fine of N100,000—each—for the alleged crimes of “defamation and conspiracy.” They ended up paying the fines to avoid jail during the trial.
A Chilling Message to Journalists in Nigeria
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the journalists will be provided with a fair trial according to their legal counsel.
“There was evidence before the trial court that the police report which purportedly indicted our clients came into existence even before they were invited by the police,” Barrister Ahmed Ibraheem Gambari, an attorney representing one of the journalists, said after they were convicted. In other words, the police deemed them guilty of the “crime” long before they were allowed to share their own side of the story. The journalists’ claims were backed by former employees of the rice factory, who said that it’s common to smoke pot during work.
“Also, an ex-employee of the company testified before the court that he was not only a witness to how smoking of Indian hemp pervaded the site but equally, it was the persistent smoking of the Indian hemp that informed his decision to sever his employment with the company,” Gambari said. “What’s more, in order to establish the verisimilitude of his assertion, the same witness tendered his bank statement evidencing the receipt of his monthly salaries from the company during the period when smoking was prevalent. It, therefore, remains a conundrum of how the court found them guilty in the face of this empirical evidence among others.”
CPJ’s Africa program coordinator based in New York, Angela Quintal, said that the two should never have been charged, let alone convicted. “The telecom surveillance used to bring the journalists into custody, followed by a more than three-year-long trial, demonstrates the lengths Nigerian authorities will go to arrest and prosecute the press,” Quintal said.
International human rights courts and UN organizations have repeatedly denounced the use of criminal sanctions for “defamation.”
New Mexico regulators fined a cannabis operator nearly $300,000 and revoked its license after the company allegedly created fake reports in the state’s traceability software.
The New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (CCD) accused marijuana manufacturer and retailer Golden Roots of 11 violations, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Golden Roots operates the The Cannabis Revolution Dispensary.
The majority of the violations are related to the Albuquerque company’s improper use of BioTrack, which has been New Mexico’s track-and-trace vendor since 2015.
The CCD alleges Golden Roots reported marijuana production only two months after it had received its vertically integrated license, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Because cannabis takes longer than two months to be cultivated, the CCD was suspicious of the report.
After inspecting the company’s premises, the CCD alleged Golden Roots reported cultivation, transportation and sales in BioTrack but wasn’t able to provide officers who inspected the site evidence that the operator was cultivating cannabis.
In April, the CCD revoked Golden Roots’ license and issued a $10,000 fine, according to the news outlet.
The company requested a hearing, which the regulator scheduled for Sept. 1.
At the hearing, the CCD testified that the company’s dried-cannabis weights in BioTrack were suspicious because they didn’t seem to accurately reflect how much weight marijuana loses as it dries.
Company employees also poorly accounted for why they were making adjustments in the system of up to 24 pounds of cannabis, making comments such as “bad” or “mistake” in the software, Albuquerque Business First reported.
Golden Roots was fined $298,972.05 – the amount regulators allege the company made selling products that weren’t properly accounted for in BioTrack.
The CCD has been cracking down on cannabis operators accused of selling products procured from out-of-state or not grown legally:
- Regulators alleged in August that Albuquerque dispensary Sawmill Sweet Leaf sold out-of-state products and didn’t have a license for extraction.
- Paradise Exotics Distro lost its license in July after regulators alleged the company sold products made in California.
Golden Roots was the first alleged rulebreaker in New Mexico to be asked to pay a large fine.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/new-mexico-cannabis-operator-fined-loses-license-for-alleged-biotrack-fraud/
Four marijuana companies, including a multistate operator, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they allege the federal MJ prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act is no longer constitutional.
According to the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, retailer Canna Provisions, Treevit delivery service CEO Gyasi Sellers, cultivator Wiseacre Farm and MSO Verano Holdings Corp. are all harmed by “the federal government’s unconstitutional ban on cultivating, manufacturing, distributing, or possessing intrastate marijuana.”
Verano is headquartered in Chicago but has operations in Massachusetts; the other three operators are based in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the “Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as applied to the intrastate cultivation, manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana pursuant to state law.”
The companies want the case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to represent them.
The New York-based firm’s principal is David Boies, whose former clients include Microsoft, former presidential candidate Al Gore and Elizabeth Holmes’ disgraced startup Theranos.
Similar challenges to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) have failed.
One such challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005.
In Gonzalez vs. Raich, the highest court in the United States ruled in a 6-3 decision that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to outlaw marijuana federally, even though state laws allow the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
In the 18 years since that ruling, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana and the federal government has allowed a multibillion-dollar cannabis industry to thrive.
Since both Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, currently headed by Garland, have declined to intervene in state-licensed marijuana markets, the key facts that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling “no longer apply,” Boies said in a statement Thursday.
“The Supreme Court has since made clear that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate purely intrastate commerce,” Boies said.
“Moreover, the facts on which those precedents are based are no longer true.”
Verano President Darren Weiss said in a statement the company is “prepared to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to align federal law with how Congress has acted for years.”
While the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana would help solve marijuana operators’ federal tax woes, neither rescheduling nor modest Congressional reforms such as the SAFER Banking Act “solve the fundamental issue,” Weiss added.
“The application of the CSA to lawful state-run cannabis business is an unconstitutional overreach on state sovereignty that has led to decades of harm, failed businesses, lost jobs, and unsafe working conditions.”
Alabama regulators are targeting Dec. 1 to award the first batch of medical cannabis business licenses after the agency’s first two attempts were scrapped because of scoring errors and litigation.
The first licenses will be awarded to individual cultivators, delivery providers, processors, dispensaries and state testing labs, according to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC).
Then, on Dec. 12, the AMCC will award licenses for vertically integrated operations, a designation set primarily for multistate operators.
Licenses are expected to be handed out 28 days after they have been awarded, so MMJ production could begin in early January, according to the Alabama Daily News.
That means MMJ products could be available for patients around early March, an AMCC spokesperson told the media outlet.
Regulators initially awarded 21 business licenses in June, only to void them after applicants alleged inconsistencies with how the applications were scored.
Then, in August, the state awarded 24 different licenses – 19 went to June recipients – only to reverse themselves again and scratch those licenses after spurned applicants filed lawsuits.
A state judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based MSO Verano Holdings Corp., but another lawsuit is pending.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/alabama-plans-to-award-medical-cannabis-licenses-dec-1/
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