He is a farmer. In that part of Mpondoland most people are. The plant he was carrying grows on those hills and has grown on them longer than anyone in the argument has been alive. His grandfather grew it. So did the man before that.

Fourteen hundred grams. A grocery bag. Less than two bags of sugar.

He was taken in. A docket was opened. He was told he was looking at a dealing charge, and the Drugs Act allows twenty five years for dealing.

Then he waited.

On the ninth of September 2024 the case came to court and the prosecutor did not put it on the roll. She spoke to the senior prosecutors first. The reason given afterwards, by a lawyer acting for the growers, was that the police had acted outside the law, and that if the State went on with it there could be civil claims against the State.

So he went home. Three weeks and change, for nothing. No conviction. No trial. Not even a case.

He said afterwards that he was grateful. He talked about the pharmaceutical industry and about exports and about what the plant could do for the place he lives. He said it like a man who had been thinking about it for a long time and had not been asked before.

Nobody paid him for the three weeks.

Here is the part that should stop you.

The arrest happened nearly six years after the Constitutional Court said that an adult using or possessing cannabis in private for his own consumption commits no offence. It happened fifteen months after the national police issued their own instruction to their own members about arrests for cannabis matters. It happened four months before the Human Rights Commission had to publish a statement reminding law enforcement to stick to that instruction, because they were not sticking to it.

The Court had thought about this exact moment. It spent fifteen paragraphs on it. What does the policeman do when he finds a man with a bag. And it answered: the State carries the onus to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the cannabis was not for personal use, and where it is hard to tell, the officer should not arrest.

That is not a footnote. That is the Chief Justice of the country writing down, in advance, exactly what should not happen on a road outside Bizana. And then it happened anyway.

The prosecutor got it right. That is worth saying, because it is not nothing. Somebody in that building read the law and stopped it. But the law only ever reached him three weeks late, and it reached him because a lawyer was standing there. Most men at most turn-offs do not have a lawyer standing there.

Now count what it cost.

Three weeks of a farmer’s life in the middle of a growing season. A docket with his name on it. A vehicle stopped, a bag taken, a family told. Whatever the trip to court cost him and whoever drove him. The quiet arithmetic of a rural district where everybody hears.

And on the other side of the ledger, nothing. No conviction, no offence, no crime, no complainant. Nobody was harmed. There was no victim in that story at any point, unless it was him.

Multiply it. That is the only honest instruction. Multiply that one man by every turn-off in that province and every year since 2018 and you have the actual cost of a country that won a case and then did nothing about it for eight years. The number that gets quoted is a thousand arrests a day before the Act. We cannot trace that figure to a study and we do not repeat it as fact. But you do not need the number. You only need the one man, and then you need to understand that he is not rare.

The argument starts here, so that you know where the reporting stopped.

Every part of what happened to him comes from one decision, which is that the State insists on policing what a man has rather than what a man does. Once it does that, somebody has to stand on a road and guess. Guess whether fourteen hundred grams is a crop or a career. Guess whether the bag in the boot is a man’s own or somebody else’s. And a guess on a road becomes a docket, and a docket becomes three weeks, and three weeks becomes a season.

Cannabis is a crop. Deal with it in law the way this country deals with maize, honey, figs and konfyt. A man grows it, a man sells it, the taxman takes his share of what the man earns, and nobody stands at a turn-off with a scale. Quality sorts itself out the way it always has, which is that people go back to the grower who cures it properly and stop going to the one who does not. That is the whole system. It has run every farm stall in this country for two hundred years and it has never needed an official.

We have made that case at length elsewhere, on treating cannabis as an ordinary commercial crop, on regulating the sale rather than the gram, and on building the value chains that would follow. This piece is not that case. This piece is one man on one road.

The law today has not changed and you should not read this as though it has.

Dealing is still a crime. Selling is still a crime. The lawful path is still narrow and it is still your own plant, your own private place, your own adult self, and nobody else’s money anywhere near it.

CannaStaySA is a directory and an information platform. We do not sell, supply, broker or facilitate the supply of cannabis, and we are not your lawyer.

But somebody should have to explain the three weeks.

Free the plant, and let the farmers farm.

Make it before they take it, Selah.
JBS

We have made that case at length in our analysis of eight years of legislative failure after the Prince judgment, detailing why cannabis should be treated as an ordinary commercial crop…