BENGALURU: Five bags of dried ganja worth Rs 1 crore were seized by Railway Protection Force (RPF) from a train at the Yeshwantpur railway station on Saturday morning. This is the largest seizure in the city this year.

A top RPF official told Express the consignment was stored in white bags, each measuring around 40 kg, and concealed below the underframe of the coaches of the Bhagalpur-Yeshwantpur Express.

“It was being taken for maintenance around 10 am when an RPF team headed by inspector Nishad spotted it,” he said.

The City police and the Narcotics Cell have recorded two major cannabis seizure cases in the last 24 hours, with three persons being arrested and a total of seven kilograms of cannabis, apart from a cache of prescription drugs, being seized from the coastal belt of the city.

The first case, involving seizure of 5.5 kg of ganja and one of the biggest seizures in recent times in the city, was cracked by the Poonthura police from an electronics shop at Beemapally around 7.30 p.m. on Saturday.

It is billed as the biggest gathering in the world. Every three years, millions of Hindus come together to bathe in a sacred river to wash away their sins. 

The Kumbh Mela festival, which rotates between four different holy sites in India, is taking place over two months this year in the city of Nashik in the state of Maharashtra. Its name, which means "Pitcher Festival," comes from a Hindu myth about an epic battle in which gods and demons fought for nectar that would grant them immortality. The gods won — but during the ruckus, drops of the nectar spilled from the pitcher that was holding it, onto the four different locations which now host the festival.

In a notification to the Congress, Obama determined that Bolivia, Burma (Myanmar), and Venezuela "failed demonstrably" during the last twelve months to make sufficient or meaningful efforts to adhere to their obligations under international counter narcotic agreements.

The medical use of hemp has been described in Ayurvedic texts and even associated with Lord Shiva.

In 1961, United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs banned all drugs, clubbing cannabis products like ganja and charas with hard drugs giving India 25 years to phase them out. It’s been 30 years since marijuana was criminalised in India. We, at The Quint, want it decriminalised.

Even today, drinking bhaang, especially during Holi, carries no stigma. Isn’t it time we celebrated and revived that culture?

The national capital continues to witness rampant marijuana trade with 122 per cent increase in the recovery of the drug this year compared to the average of the past three years.

Around 3,350 kg of marijuana has been recovered till August 31, making it the highest recovery for any year in the books of Delhi Police. In 2014, around 1,780 Kg of marijuana was recovered in the entire year.

The police, however, claimed the steep increase in seizure reflects sincere efforts on their part and not that the city has a flourishing cannabis market. "We have a dedicated team for tracking narcotics traffickers. The high recovery rate reflects ceaseless and sincere efforts by the team," said Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Yadav.

If you are in the international market for marijuana, your legal options are limited. Though the cultivation of pot is widespread across the world, its legal status has only just begun to shift, with some countries choosing to decriminalize the substance and others loosening up enforcement regulations for users and growers.

The plant can grow just about anywhere, making it generally accessible to the global population, and, subsequently, one of the most commonly used illicit substances everywhere from the Americas to Europe. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, there are more than 177 million cannabis users globally.

Only recently we had published an article explaining how scientists at the National Institute of Health (NIH) have found cannabis to be a potential killer of cancer cells. You can read the article here. 

On that note, we're going to talk about a scientific explanation that supports the NIH claim: "cannabis and cannabinoids may have benefits in treating the symptoms of cancer or the side effects of cancer therapies."