[imagesource:saps]

It’s been a year since the Constitutional Court decriminalised the personal and private use of dagga (admittedly, that picture above may constitute more dagga than is necessary for ‘personal use’), which is something worth lighting up in honour of.

Sadly, in a country where law enforcement is already stretched so thin, valuable police resources are still being squandered on efforts to try and prevent people from exercising that constitutional right.

Leading that charge is police minister Bheki Cele, and he’s always been outspoken about thinking that dagga is some kind of gateway drug.

TimesLIVE below:

On September 19, a day after the ruling last year, Cele told students at the University of Zululand that “everyone starts with dagga, then Mandrax and then coke [cocaine], which means now everyone is on the same path to start drugs”.

Hey Bheki, why don’t you ask the women of this country how they would rather the police spent their time – chasing down people who smoke dagga, or devoting that energy to putting rapists and murderers behind bars?

Activist Gareth Prince has been keeping a close eye on law enforcement’s reaction to the ConCourt ruling, and he says there’s “a reluctance on the part of our government to accept the Constitutional Court’s ruling”:

“One year after the Constitutional Court judgment, we still have a minister of police that is hellbent on arresting people for growing cannabis, a minister of police that has gone on record saying that if you grow cannabis at your house – which the Constitutional Court granted you to do – you have a drug lab at your house,” Gareth Prince [said].

Renata Larroyd / M&G

What about if you grow some odd-looking tomatoes at your place? Asking for a friend.

When the ConCourt handed down the ruling in September of last year, they gave the government two years to amend the laws that govern dagga use in South Africa.

12 months down the line, and it seems that little progress has been made, and the arrests continue:

Nonprofit organisation Fields of Green has launched a helpline called #StoptheCops, which assists those arrested for possession of cannabis.

The organisation’s Charl Henning told Times Select that in many cases, dagga growers were targeted by corrupt police officers.

“They want a bribe in exchange for not making an arrest. In other cases, some cops go in and trash dagga plants just to scare growers,” he said.

The Fields of Green helpline (063 174 0938) has received more than 160 calls between January 2018 to August this year, and many of the complaints cover the basics associated with arrest, such as having your rights read to you, and having the evidence weighed in front of you.

Here’s more from Henning:

“The [number of] arrests have gone down, but have become very problematic. Up till the privacy judgment, we could still apply for a stay of prosecution, but now the police have free rein because there literally is no regulation or law around cannabis in SA, so the police are only using cannabis for corruption and extortion.

“The magistrates throw out most cases on Mondays, and the rest gets postponed indefinitely,” said Henning.

Looks like it’s not just traffic officers who are looking for a bribe, then.

Nobody is saying you should smoke all day, every day, but we should be afforded the right to use a plant in the privacy of our own homes if we see fit.

South African lawmakers need to amend these laws so that the grey areas are taken out of play, which will curb the corruption on the part of police, and we, the public, need to make it clear that we want the police to tackle issues that are of actual concern to our everyday lives.

Look at the latest crime stats – we really do have bigger fish to fry.

[source:timeslive]