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| Any living thing with a spine has cannabis receptors, which promotes health and which is why making cannabis illegal is a crime against humanity. |
First the lies
LAST month, in an old age home in Pietermaritzburg, a matron grabbed a small bottle of cannabis oil from a pensioner and poured the contents down the drain, telling the pensioner dagga is illegal.
Now, before we get into healing properties of cannabinoids, lets look
at the two victims in this sad little incident. Two victims?
Yes, one victim the pensioner who lost an affordable pain killer,
the second the matron who has been brainwashed by 90 years of lies. Of the two,
I would argue it is the matron who needs our sympathy the most.
For those lies about dagga has its roots in the British imperialist
view in the 1880s that white people are superior to the more “savage” races, as
evidenced in the 2009 thesis on the history of dagga in
South Africa by Rhodes historian Craig Paterson.
South Africa by Rhodes historian Craig Paterson.
The dream
While the pensioner’s mind is no longer shackled by this racist law, the matron still believes the lie that cannabis is a dangerous drug. While the plant can be abused like any powerful muthi, cannabis is in fact an easy-to-grow herb, the extracts of which provide anti-inflammatory pain relief, fights several cancers and clears the "sludge" causing Alzheimer’s, to name but a few of the plant’s proven medicinal effects.
Because dagga can provide a cheap cure for several cancers and a
host of ills, it should be grown all over KZN, so that rural people can sell
their graded harvest twice a year at open auctions, as is done with wool and
diamonds. This was the dream of two great men, dr Mario Mario Oriani-Ambrosini
and advocate Robin Stransham-Ford, both of whom were dying of cancers when they
drafted the Medical Innovations Bill (MIB) in 2014.
The reality
These two statesmen hoped to make dagga legal in a country where carrying just a 0,006 grams of a flower still lands hundreds of people in jail each week, as happened to a 20-year-old cyclist in Killarney Valley last month. As is often the case in these “dagga busts”, five police vehicles and at least 10 officers were on hand to stop one shy young man from cycling home, choking and manhandling him into a van, and at the station intimidating him to sign an admission of guilt and then leaving him with a criminal record on an open docket.
All for carrying a pinch of dried petals from a cannabis flower
that doctors agree activates the endo-cannaboid system in our bodies that keeps
us healthy. The irony is, if Manie had cash on him, a “spot fine” would have
made all his troubles disappear, especially in the Killarney Valley, if the tales of bribed demanded are all true.
Or if he had known his laws, he could have pointed out the cops that paragraph seven of the MIB, supposed to becme law in April, states “no one shall be liable or guilty of any offence for growing, processing, distributing, using, prescribing, advertising, or otherwise dealing with or promoting cannabinoids for purposes of treatment and commercial or industrial uses”.
Or if he had known his laws, he could have pointed out the cops that paragraph seven of the MIB, supposed to becme law in April, states “no one shall be liable or guilty of any offence for growing, processing, distributing, using, prescribing, advertising, or otherwise dealing with or promoting cannabinoids for purposes of treatment and commercial or industrial uses”.
The more things change...
With this bill is supposed to become law in April, and having been tabled back in 2014, you'd think our magistrates, prosecutors and police would have taken note that times are a changing when it comes to weed. Instead, the police still issue weekly press releases boasting about their latest dagga haul following a tip-off, despite this being ruled against by the Constitutional Court in July last year. The ConCourt ruled that sections 11 (a) and (g) of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act, that allows police officers to go search and seize drugs without a warrant, infringe on the right to privacy to a degree that cannot be justified. The ruling meant all search and seizures without a warrant since July 2016 is unconstitutional and opens the arresting cops for civil law suits.
Perhaps the cops ignore this ConCourt ruling because all old cops
know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For instead of
enacting the MIB to allow dagga in every garden, South Africa’s large
pro-cannabis community predict on social media that, come April, the MIB will be
shelved and instead, the new Medicines Control Amendment Act will allow only a few
pharmaceutical companies to make and sell very expensive cannabis products.
The other side of the law
Meanwhile the 150-year-old civil disobedience movement whose millions of members have always defied South Africa’s racist dagga law, grow daily (pun intended). They argue cannabis make people healthier and pain-free and can quickly remove tumours and cancers when people also change their diet (no sugar!) and minds (forgive!).
They want dagga to be free to all and agree the continued denial of
this is, in Mario-Ambrosini’s word, a crime against humanity.
In KZN, the SA Cannabis Community and Regulatory Association
(SaccRa) spearheads the campaign to stop this crime against humanity. Their main
aim is to set voluntary standards for growing and processing cannabis for anyone
to make their own strong, low-cost medicine. In this they — and all other dagga
users — are actively opposed by the seven government departments being sued by
the so-called Dagga Couple for prohibiting cannabis on reasons that are based on
Social Darwinism, poor politics and non-science.
Join the pro-cannabis crusade
can do so on the websites of either Saccra or Fields of Green For All.
