Both options are prohibitive in their own ways — somewhere between the astronomically high administrative and financial requirements imposed by our medical regime and the arbitrarily low 0.2% THC threshold by which “hemp” is defined, the original indigenous custodians of South Africa’s cannabis find themselves unable to derive any kind of financial benefit from its trade.
Therefore, in order to pave the way for new non-Western medicinal uses and trades of high-THC cannabis, the schedules in both the Medicines Act and the Drugs Act must be amended. Furthermore, a single plant that can be used for spiritual, medicinal, industrial, agricultural and recreational purposes all at once cannot hope to be shoehorned into a pre-existing legislative framework that was developed largely — if not entirely — post-prohibition.
Stemming from these considerations, we posit first that any regulation of the cannabis-related affairs of our indigenous communities ought to be entirely non-invasive inasmuch as use and trade of cannabis within these communities are concerned.