Agya Nson Ogyasramma
“The fight we started – what we wanted, is not what we are getting.”
Legalization and decriminalization in South Africa, Jamaica, St. Kitts, Barbados and Antigua was tokenism. In Ghana, depenalization and non-custodial sentencing have still brought punishment.
The arrests and fines belong with prohibition’s categories – medicinal, industrial, recreational, sacramental. Those terms fracture the herb’s holistic purpose.
Hemp and medicinal cannabis legalization can be peripheral. State-sanctioned medicinal and industrial cannabis was always legal anyway.
Sacramental rights fractured the cannabis community and left people in limbo.
It seems we have been praying for the wrong things. We demanded ‘legalization’ because it is a widely used term. But, it is a placeholder for abolition. What we really want is to end the arrests: the abolition of cannabis prohibition.
Legalization compromises the vision.
Governments have been beholden to drug treaties’ prohibitionist interpretations, while the treaties are actually subject to respective signatory nations’ constitutions – not the other way around.
We cannot blame law-makers or the judiciary for the impasse. Court decisions depend on the cases presented; legislatures make laws based on demands made. Yet parliament should not be expected to draft bills to secure our fundamental freedoms.
Only the ganja community can draft meaningful marijuana laws. Have we demanded what we really want?
Abolition, not prohibition’s legalization.
By Agya Nson Ogyasramma
