Restricting ganja to 'private' use

The following are excerpts from the findings of the Ganja Commision chaired by Professor Barry Chevannes.

The overwhelming majority of persons appearing before the Commission feel that ganja should be decriminalised, but are united in restricting its use to private space and to adults. Some of their arguments are presented below.

PERSONAL BENEFITS

These range from miraculous-like cures to relief from simple colds, but they include well-known ailments and symptoms such as asthma and glaucoma. The Commission received many personal testimonies of benefits from either smoking ganja or ingesting it as tea or medicine steeped in rum.

We heard the tale of a woman whose beast of burden was cured from the ashes stuffed in a wound; of a man stricken as a schoolboy with dengue fever, who drank the tea and was cured overnight; of a former Jamaica Constabulary Force member whose chronic hypertension, after 19 years of prescribed medication, completely disappeared with the now regular smoking of ganja.

The stories of personalised benefits of ganja are so deeply entrenched in the folklore of the people that we do not think any warnings as to its danger or attempt to suppress its use by punitive sanction stand any chance of success. More so because of recent scientific advances in manufacturing legal drugs from it as well as much publicised changes permitting "medical marijuana" at State levels in the United States and in Canada.

GOD AND THE NATURAL ORDER

The Commission interviewed many people for whom the present laws fly in the face of God, the Creator. Their argument is that ganja is a natural, not a man-made, substance, given by God to be used by mankind as mankind sees fit, the same way that He provides other herbs and bushes. As a natural substance, ganja does not even have to be cultivated. Spread by birds and other vectors, it grows wild. It therefore cannot be eradicated.

God also created other poisonous herbs but none of these is subject to the prohibition imposed by the law. In the simple words of a 32-year-old handyman in Montego Bay, "the weed don't really have no revenge carrying because it comes from God. He created all earth, trees, seeds, you know, so if you are going to fight against it you are fighting against what He does. You already know that man fight against a lot of things that He does. If you are going to charge a man for it you have to charge God because God make it."

Or in the words of a 65-year-old retired postal service worker, "I hate to hear the word legalise, because how can you legalise the thing that God create? People must think weh dem talking, man. God say every herb is made for man, so God wen wrong when he mek ganja? God wen wrong? I tell you I hate to use the word legalise because you can't legalise weh God create, because God a God!"

With such deeply-held religious views, which cut across gender and age, many regard the existence of the laws against ganja as evil.

NOT A CRIME

We met no one who regarded the simple possession or use of ganja as a crime in itself. There were those few, who, opposed to any change whatever, saw it as criminal by definition, that is criminal because the law says it is.

But of the hundreds of people who spoke no one saw the drinking of ganja tea, or folk remedy use, as a socially harmful act belonging to the category of offences against other persons. In other words, ganja use to them is not immoral. Many Christians found smoking in general to be reprehensible, if not sinful, and so categorised ganja smoking, but they too saw nothing essentially criminal about drinking it for tea or using it for medication.

INEQUITY

Universally, in the Commission's visits throughout the island, the views were everywhere the same: it was grossly unfair that alcohol and tobacco already proven to be more harmful substances were legal but ganja was criminal.

"What happen to tobacco weh a kill nuff people and a give people cancer", angrily asked a young man in an inner city community, "how dem legalise that and have that pon di shelf?"

The difficulty of reconciling the legal status of tobacco, a known cause of lung cancer, or alcohol, a known cause of death, with the illegal status of ganja, not known in its entire history for having been the cause of a single death, led some to speculate that this was a form of the whiskey-drinking classes trying to keep down the poor man from having his "poor man whiskey", or of the "white people" suppressing the colonial peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas, or, finally, of the liquor and tobacco companies stifling potential competition.

ALLEVIATION OF STRESS

Stress alleviation is a personal benefit, but we single it out because of the peculiar psychological effect attributed to it by so many we spoke with. A man told us of his experience, when, as a young man, he had taken a resolve to kill a policeman who was relentless in harrassing him, but how a smoke of ganja calmed him, put the conflict in perspective, and saved the lawman's life as well as his own.

Others went on to say of themselves, "We weh deh pon di road, we a prisoner, too, because we deh in a little segment. A herb we have fi use fi keep our control said way! A it mek we can go on day to day underneath dem stress ya weh wi a face. A herb wi have fi bun more time fi hold it and so that we don't do silly things!"

We understood him to mean that they too, although technically free, were prisoners of the ghetto, their "little segment", and resorted to ganja to keep control over themselves, to keep from doing "silly things", that is running afoul of the law.

CRIMINALISING THE NON-CRIMINAL

Many submissions addressed the danger to society already posed by criminalising ganja. A corollary of the lumping of ganja users together with men who have committed serious crimes against the person only serves to corrupt them.

According to many, the jailed ganja offender is often forced into a situation where unless he exhibits "bad man" ways he cannot survive the lock ups, or where he develops sympathy for hardened criminals or enter into relations with them. Having gone in as a law-abiding person, except for ganja, which no one regards as wrong, he returns a bitter opponent of the rule of the law.

Others, including one officer of the law, identify the criminal problem with ganja as coming not from its effect on the user but from the illegal and immoral activities surrounding the growing and trafficking of it. Their views coincide remarkably with the views of experts who cite the effect of Prohibition in the United States up to the 1930s.

Complete legalisation of all banned substances, these experts argue, would cripple the criminal syndicates and organisations that are reaping vast amounts of wealth controlling the production and distribution, and by replacing the emphasis on education and rehabilitation would be less costly to State and society than the efforts to suppress.

CRACK/COCAINE

Almost everywhere it went, in town, in country, the Commission heard tell of the scourge which crack/cocaine addiction has had on communities. In terms of social impact, ganja use was far less a threat than cocaine addiction. A 62-year-old housewife in a passionate statement, told the Commission:

As I stand up here, I have a son and him have eight subjects in CXC. And if I stand up here, him will sell me. I can't take mi eye off him. Him break mi place and him do all manner of evil. Sometimes me say me would a buy something and poison him kill him. Me naw tell you nuh lie, you know. Mi say I woulda give him a good plate a food and see him dead. Mi tired a it, me get fed up. Well if him did a smoke the ganja, me nuh think him woulda gwaan so. The coke mash up the people-dem. A dat the people must hail out on, not the ganja. I don't smoke and I don't know what dem get from it, but I believe a di coke dem fi stan up on.

This mother's pain was intense and personal. But other depositions made before the Commission represented that serious erosion of the social fabric, which once guaranteed the stability of community life, has been taking place. The corruption crack/cocaine has brought poses, they believe, a serious threat to the society. They link the call to decriminalise ganja to the urgent need to curb the cocaine menace.

VIEWS OF EXPERTS AND INFLUENTIAL LEADERS

Written and oral submissions were made by a number of professionals, volunteers and persons of influence in the country, whose expertise and special interest make their views compelling.

PROFESSIONAL AND VOLUNTEER WORKERS WITH ADDICTS

In their own individual capacities, several professionals and volunteers declared their support for the decriminalisation of ganja to the extent set out in the Terms of Reference. Their arguments cover some of those proffered by the general public, for example the inconsistency where tobacco and alcohol are concerned, but include as well:

(i) the fact that ganja is not manifestly harmful for the majority of people who use it in one form or another;

(ii) the inability to suppress it by legal means;

(iii) the wasteful use made of the criminal justice system, in terms of its human and financial resources; and

(iv) the compromising of the anti-drug message.

In relation to (iv) the views of two experts are well worth quoting verbatim.

Expert 1: In our school programme there is no perception of harm in the use of ganja, none whatsoever. So, let us say that education is the key.

Expert 2: It is very, very hard to convince these young people that they should not smoke it.

Expert 1: Personally, I am not so sure whether decriminalising would make a big difference. Our young people are trying to give us a message and we are not listening to them. They have not bought (our) message, and for some reason the education that we have been giving them maybe has not been clear. They are getting cross-messages.

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