I must say that the whole legalisation of marijuana issue, which is clearly a worldwide trend, and it will come to South Africa in due course, is a troubling one.  I don’t think it is clear-cut. When I was younger I would probably have said that it had to be legalised and I was very disappointed when Gareth Prince was denied by a one vote majority in the Constitutional Court of becoming an attorney because of his continued use of marijuana.  It was the narrowest of margins that he lost by, I think 6/5 if I recall, and I always felt terribly sorry for him.  

I think that it is inevitable that marijuana will be legalised around the world because more and more countries allow it on a “medical basis”.  The medical basis is however a farce because people forget that in most countries you can pick up a telephone, have your call outsourced to a doctor in India or Canada or who knows where and once you have explained that you are suffering from migraines, nervousness or some or other nonsense, you are going to get a script for medical marijuana.  Once you open the door to medical marijuana, you are basically legalising marijuana because one way or another, as some people know when they go to doctors for sick notes for work, you will get what you want.  

The problem is that dagga is not good for you, it is not good for your motivation and I really think it leads to demotivated people who sit and complain about the world. While some people may use it sparingly as a laugh, others don’t.  What do you do when you can no longer stop somebody using something because the substance they are using is now legalised?  Isn’t that exactly the situation with alcohol?  You cannot stop an alcoholic from drinking because there is no law against them drinking. All the power that one has to try and help those people who have an addictive personality and cannot limit their use of a substance which is bad for them, is gone once something is legalised.  I don’t think marijuana is the worst drug in the world – I think it is probably as bad or equal to alcohol but there are many people who just cannot control their use of either alcohol or marijuana.  

Legalising marijuana will of course prevent organised criminals from selling one of their biggest profitable drugs and may damage their sales of other drugs as well.  The problem with cannabis is that a minority of users do develop a dependency on it, and so you cannot really say they have, as an adult of free choice to smoke it or not, they just cannot help themselves.  On the other hand, we will never prevent people smoking dagga, but when this debate does come to South Africa I do hope that we find ways to control it, make sure that all advertising of it is absolutely banned and deal in some way, perhaps with the taxes on people who will be allowed to sell it and produce it, for catering for treatment for those who do become dependent on dagga.