Several jurisdictions around the world now permit some level of legal cannabis activity by consumers, patients and, in some cases, entrepreneurs. In places where cannabis is legal for medical or adult use, there has never been a better time to be a cannabis patient or consumer since the dawn of cannabis prohibition. Those freedoms did not come about randomly. They were only achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of local cannabis activists, and it is important that, as the global cannabis industry continues to spread, activism efforts continue.

While it is hard to pinpoint the first official cannabis activism effort, it is a safe bet that many such efforts began immediately and simultaneously after jurisdictions around the world enacted prohibition. Cannabis prohibition has been a harmful public policy since the very beginning, and sensible people with compassion and empathy have pushed back against it in various ways.

The First Major Cannabis Reform Victory

The first major cannabis reform victory occurred in 1973 in the State of Oregon when lawmakers approved a cannabis decriminalization measure. For the first time in nearly four decades in the United States, consumers no longer faced jail time for possessing a personal amount of cannabis (one ounce) in Oregon. Instead, they were fined and faced no criminal charges.

Another major cannabis reform victory occurred in 1996 in California when the state’s voters approved Proposition 215, making California the first state in the U.S. to legalize medical cannabis. Suffering patients in California were finally able to gain safe access to their medicine without fear of any penalty. The Proposition 215 victory ushered in a new era for state-level medical cannabis legalization in the U.S., and by extension, inspired countries around the world to enact medical cannabis policy modernizations of their own.

The next frontier for cannabis policy modernization came in 2012, when Colorado and Washington State both adopted adult-use cannabis legalization measures on Election Day. The following year, Uruguay made history by becoming the first country to adopt a national adult-use cannabis legalization measure.

Cannabis Wins of Today

Zoom forward to today, and several countries have adopted national recreational cannabis legalization measures. Canada, Malta, Luxembourg, Germany, South Africa, and the Czech Republic have all joined Uruguay in adopting such measures, with Czechia’s law scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2026. All of the victories that have piled up came about as a result of the work of passionate cannabis advocates.

The collective cannabis community mustn’t get complacent and make the mistake of taking newly afforded freedoms for granted. Just because medical and adult-use policy modernization victories have been achieved does not mean that there is no chance of policy regressions. One needs to look no further than Thailand to find a real-world example of this phenomenon occurring.

Lawmakers in Thailand approved a historic cannabis measure in 2022 that yielded exponential growth for the nation’s emerging cannabis industry. Thailand’s Narcotics Law was amended in 2022, resulting in cannabis being removed from the nation’s list of controlled drugs. That led to the country becoming one of the top cannabis tourism destinations on the planet.

Some Cannabis Laws Regressing

Unfortunately, the Pheu Thai party eventually won control of the nation’s government and tightened regulations earlier this year. The policy change banned retailers from selling cannabis to customers without a prescription and reclassified cannabis as a controlled substance. Ongoing efforts are underway to take cannabis laws and regulations backwards in other jurisdictions as well.

One of the most noteworthy examples is in Germany, where the Federal Cabinet recently approved a measure that would amend the Medical Cannabis Act (MedCanG). The measure was drafted by the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), and if approved, would require personal contact between the patient and doctor before a cannabis prescription can be approved. Restrictions on mail-order medical cannabis are also part of the proposal. Both changes would negatively impact suffering patients, particularly patients who live in rural areas or have mobility limitations. The proposal is sure to be a top focus at the upcoming International Cannabis Business Conference in Berlin on April on April 13-15, 2026.

Even in the United States, where two dozen states have adopted adult-use cannabis legalization measures, efforts are in full swing to reverse state-level legalization provisions. For example, in Ohio, the House of Representatives recently approved a measure that, while not a full legalization reversal, would revise the state’s legalization law to remove certain protections of adult-use cannabis activity. Cannabis opponents are waging a citizen initiative in Massachusetts that seeks to drastically roll back that state’s legalization model as well.

The Battle Presses On

These are just a few examples of efforts by cannabis opponents to reverse the progress that cannabis advocates have made in recent years. All such efforts serve as reminders that the battle is never over when it comes to cannabis reform, and cannabis patients, consumers, and advocates need to refrain from getting too comfortable. Always keep fighting for sensible cannabis policies. The future of cannabis depends on it.

The post Continued Activism Is Vital for the Future of Global Cannabis appeared first on Cannabis Now.

Bitcoin Magazine

These New Shareholder Tools Make Bitcoin Activism Easy to Launch and Hard to Ignore

For most of my life, the limiting factor in bringing my ideas to life has been code. I’ve always had a clear vision for the tools I wanted to build, but the execution gap was real. The ideas stayed on whiteboards, in notebooks, or in half-finished PhotoShop mockups.

That barrier no longer exists.
AI has collapsed it.

In just 9 days, I built two fully functioning consumer applications designed to equip shareholders with the leverage they’ve never had: the ability to advocate—cleanly, credibly, and at scale, for Bitcoin on the corporate balance sheet.

These tools weren’t commissioned. No one told me to build them. They are not fancy, intricate, or technically complicated. They came from a simple observation: 1) corporations control the majority of global capital, and 2) shareholders deserve a frictionless way to push those corporations toward strategic, long-term Bitcoin adoption.

1. The Bitcoin Treasury Simulator

The Bitcoin Treasury Simulator answers a question that should be trivial but wasn’t:
How would a company have performed if it had allocated even a portion of its treasury to Bitcoin?

Retail investors can now enter a ticker, choose a time frame, and instantly see the opportunity cost of holding cash instead of Bitcoin—expressed in clear, defensible terms that anyone can understand.

For the first time, shareholders have a factual, data-driven tool they can bring to boards, IR teams, and fellow investors to show exactly what’s at stake.

Try the simulator: simulator.bitcoinforcorporations.com

2. The Bitcoin Treasury Shareholder Activism Kit

Shareholder activism has always been powerful, but it’s been inaccessible to most investors. The rules are complex. The legalese is intimidating. The entire process feels like a wall you only get past if you’re a lawyer or a billion-dollar fund.

So I built a generator that removes all of that friction.

The Bitcoin Treasury Shareholder Activism Kit walks any verified shareholder—step by step—through generating a legitimate, SEC-compliant proposal asking a company to evaluate or adopt a Bitcoin treasury strategy. It produces the documentation, the language, the filing structure, and the instructions needed to get the proposal included in the company’s proxy.

Something that once felt like it required attorneys and institutional resources can now be completed in 2 minutes.

Create your kit: kit.bitcoinforcorporations.com

Why These Tools Exist

Corporate Bitcoin adoption does not happen by accident. It happens because someone—inside or outside the company—pushes for it with clarity, precision, and persistence.

These tools are built for the people willing to make that push.

They give shareholders:

• Clear data.
• A credible filing pathway.
• A structured way to change corporate behavior.
• And the confidence to take action without needing permission.

If you understand the value of compute, you should understand #Bitcoin.

Yet @Nvidia sits on ~$43B in cash.#Bitcoin outpaced cash reserves by ~41x over the last 3 years—That's nearly $216B in opportunity cost. pic.twitter.com/AftSN7LHpm

— Nick Ward (@nckbtc) November 11, 2025

What Comes Next

This is just the beginning. Both tools will evolve, expand, and integrate more deeply into the broader Bitcoin For Corporations ecosystem. But the important part is this: AI has made technical hurdles of these projects much easier to overcome.

And if enough people decide to build the future they want—one tool at a time—we accelerate corporate Bitcoin adoption far faster than anyone expects.

Disclaimer: This content was written on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations. This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be interpreted as an invitation or solicitation to acquire, purchase or subscribe for securities.

This post These New Shareholder Tools Make Bitcoin Activism Easy to Launch and Hard to Ignore first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.

Today, “equity” is a watchword in the cannabis legalization movement, as state and local governments try to craft models for an adult-use market designed to correct the social harms of prohibition and the War on Drugs. But this public consciousness is due to the work of many who pushed the issue long before doing so was entirely socially acceptable.

Sister Somayah Kambui, a veteran Black Panther turned cannabis advocate, was one of those who brought issues of racial justice to the forefront of the cannabis movement. And before her untimely death, she won a groundbreaking “jury nullification” victory, upholding her right to provide cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia.

Sister Somayah, as she was ubiquitously known (she was born Renee Moore), used cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia, under the terms of California’s Proposition 215 medical marijuana measure after its passage in 1996. But her vocal advocacy made her a target of the authorities — resulting in her unprecedented legal victory. 

Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic blood anomaly that occurs in one in every 70,000 Americans, particularly those of African descent. It can cause debilitating pain, fatigue and swelling of the hands and feet. It took Kambui a while to figure out that cannabis was the most effective treatment for her.

Kambui was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where she served several years during the Vietnam era. At VA and public hospitals, she was given morphine for her pain from the disease. 

“I couldn’t do anything on the morph,” she told High Times reporter Peter Gorman. “And neither can a million other people. That’s why you see so many middle aged and older black folk sitting on stoops looking like junkies. They are junkies. They’re U.S. government junkies.”

After finding that cannabis helped, and after the passage of Prop 215, she founded the Crescent Alliance Self Help for Sickle Cell collective, or “buyers’ club.” With a doctor’s recommendation, she began cultivating in her South Los Angeles backyard.

But the police raided her garden in October 2001 and confiscated, by their estimate, 200 pounds of cannabis plants. 

The LAPD brought in a helicopter for the raid, menacing the block of single-family homes.

“I was sitting having a cup of coffee with a little hemp oil when they broke down the door,” Kambui told the Los Angeles Times. “I said, ‘I’m legal, I have a doctor’s note and I’m compliant with the law.'”

She said the officers told her she had too much for her personal use. “I said ‘OK, why don’t you take what you think I don’t need and leave me the rest?'” she recalled to the LA Times. “They took it all.” 

She also disputed the police estimate of the haul. “That is 200 pounds wet, with dirt and stalks,” she said.

Kambui was arrested, spent 60 days in jail and was charged with multiple felonies including cultivation, sale and shipping marijuana out of state. Worse still, she was facing a life prison term under California’s “Three Strikes” law. Her two prior convictions, involving illegal firearms possession and explosives, stemmed from her work with the Black Panthers in the early 1970s. During her time as a legendary Panther, she was known as “Peaches,” and was a leader of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, alongside Geronimo Pratt.

When she went before the judge at Los Angeles County Court in January 2002, Kambui said the cannabis was not for her use alone, but was to be shared with some dozen sickle-cell sufferers in her club. “They’re all mine,” she said, taking full responsibility for all the uprooted plants. She also admitted shipping to sufferers who were too far away to come see her. 

And she asserted that her advocacy had made her a target, noting that she’d been similarly raided in 1998 — although the charges were dropped after she spent two weeks in jail.  

Making a medical necessity defense, Kambui spoke to the court of the long centuries of medicinal cannabis use in African traditional healing. Using her own idiosyncratic lingo, she referred to the African continent as “Nigretia,” and to her cannabis as “Nigretian Kif.”  

The trial ended in an outcome that The Leaf Online website hailed as a “jury revolt or jury nullification,” in which a defendant is acquitted on moral or ethical grounds, in spite of uncontested evidence that she or he acted as charged. On March 18, 2002, Sister Somayah Kambui was found “not guilty” of all charges.

In addition to being a rare victory for the doctrine of nullification, Kambui’s legal battle also anticipated a change in California law. It was the following year that the “medical marijuana collective defense” was enshrined in the Medical Marijuana Program Act, the notorious Senate Bill 420. 

Pushing Racial Justice in the Cannabis Community 

By the time of her court case, Kambui was already a leading figure in Southern California’s cannabis activist scene. She was the key mover behind the first Los Angeles Global Marijuana March in 1999, and all the subsequent ones until her death. And she was particularly aggressive in calling out the cannabis community one what she saw as its internal racism — for instance, in failing to emphasize sickle-cell anemia in medical marijuana advocacy, and failing to make the link between prohibition and militarized policing of black and brown communities.

But she bridged a cultural divide in 1997, when she teamed up with B.E. Smith, a brazen and police-defying cannabis grower of white redneck roots in the backwoods of Northern California’s Trinity Alps. Smith became “designated caregiver” for Kambui, among a handful of other medical users around the state. Alas, she never got to use B.E.’s bud, as his cultivation site was raided by federal agents that harvest season—resulting in his own landmark legal battle. Smith died earlier this year.

Unfortunately, Kambui’s run-ins with the law were not over after her court victory. In October 2003, her garden was again raided — this time by the DEA. A dozen plants were uprooted, although no charges were filed. 

California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer decried the raid as a “mean-spirited, gratuitous attack on a seriously ill woman who has been judged guiltless by her peers under California law. Like other victims of DEA’s medical marijuana raids, Somayah was targeted because she was a vocal, legal patient activist who was a thorn in the side of the law enforcement establishment.” 

Like many front-line activists who put a commitment to community ahead of personal gain, Kambui received little material reward for her efforts. When she died on Thanksgiving 2008, at the age of 57, the website Time4Hemp wrote that economic hard times likely contributed to her demise: “Many close to her believe she died of a broken heart based on lack of financial support. All those dispensaries in Los Angeles and not one would help her save her home from foreclosure.” 

Twelve years after her passing, Sister Somayah Kambui reminds us of the need to preserve the memory of those who sacrificed for such freedom and consciousness as we have now achieved. And more poignantly, of the need to honor and support our freedom fighters while they still walk among us. 

TELL US, what did you learn from Sister Somayah?

The post Sister Somayah Kambui: An Early Visionary of Cannabis Equity appeared first on Cannabis Now.