One Saturday in Cape Town Central’s police cells during the early 1990s an alleged diamond smuggler, shoplifter and dagga kop were anticipating the 36 hours to the bail hearings and a clock winding down to the late-night arrivals of the well-soused. The best-dressed man in the room said: “Someday they’lland not the way hippies like you hope. It’ll be drip-feeding a market from a huge pond.”
South Africa is scheduled to inherit the mantle of the world’s largest regulated marijuana market from Canada on September 18 under a “legalisation” banner — the Orwellian translation for cannabis rationing. allow recreational smokers a gulp of legal air and impose lengthy jail sentences for artisanal medical marijuana producers.
The 2020 Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill’s sleight of hand is the low ceiling afforded for home grown, “trafficking” offences for cultivating six female plants or more and jail time ratcheting up to 15 years for an avid horticulturist. At Home with Cannabis “The Constitutional Court did not put limitations on privacy,” she says. “I don’t see how putting these very strict restrictions is going to promote my right to privacy.
“There are too many vested interests” for it to be legalised without restrictions, Tony Budden, a leading Cape Town cannabis entrepreneur of 25 years,The post-prohibition cannabis laws allow recreational smokers a gulp of legal air and impose lengthy jail sentences for artisanal medical marijuana producers.
Cannabis, unbridled of its legal baggage to promote a raw-materials abundance, will flip the plant’s cardinal sin of industrial promiscuity to the entrepreneurs’ advantage. The plant’s versatility allows both low- and hi-tech “beneficiation” to roll out products threatening corporate supply lines: construction, animal feed, textiles, insecticides and cooking oils, are just a short selection of its thousands of industrial applications.