She has four rooms. Three she lets and one she sleeps in.

The geyser is on a timer from the load-shedding years and she still checks it twice. She does her own linen. She drives to the wholesaler in a bakkie with too much on the clock and she buys rusks in bulk, because men from other countries eat rusks like they have never been shown bread before.

Paarl. You know the town. Vines, a mountain, a main road too long for the number of people on it.

On Thursday the International Cricket Council published a schedule and her town was on it.

Fifty-seven matches. Fourteen teams. Twelve grounds, eight of them in this country, and one of the eight is hers. It starts on 2 October 2027 and it ends on 21 November 2027. Fifty-one days. The schedule came out a year and a day before the first ball, which is the most organised thing anybody has yet done about any of this.

She does not know. She will hear it from a neighbour, or from a man phoning about a block booking in a voice that already knows what the rooms are worth, and by then the price will have moved without her.

What is coming up her driveway

People from fourteen countries.

Some of them will come from places where you buy it in a shop, off a shelf, with a government label stuck on the tin like it is cough syrup. Some will come from places where being found with it costs you years of your life. Most will come from somewhere in between, where it is illegal and everybody does it anyway and the police have other work.

They will all be in her three rooms, in turn, for fifty-one days.

A good number of them will land here believing we legalised it. They read it somewhere. A court, a year, 2018, a word they half remember. They will put their bags down and they will ask her, because she is the one standing there.

And she will have nothing to tell them. Nobody told her either.

What the law is

An adult may use cannabis in private and may possess it in private for his own use. That is Prince, decided in the Constitutional Court in 2018, and it has not moved since.

Read what the Court actually did. It protected private use, private possession and private cultivation. It did not legalise sale. It did not open a supply route, and it was never asked to.

So selling it is a crime. Giving it to a paying guest is a crime. Arranging for somebody else to give it to a paying guest is a crime. The Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act of 1992 is still the Act and dealing is still as wide as that Act says it is.

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act was assented to in May 2024. It has never commenced. The State’s own record still marks it to be proclaimed. In February this year the Department of Justice published draft regulations under it, in Gazette 54061, and asked the public for comment by 5 March 2026. Comment closed. Nothing has come out of it since.

I opened that department’s own consultation page this morning. The cannabis draft is still sitting on it, released 3 February 2026. Two hundred and forty-one days. The line next to it still has no closing date. The notice you download closed comment on 5 March. The page has not caught up with its own paper. Three bills put out on 7 August this year sit above it, and those do print the day comment shut.

So unless something changes, this is the position on the morning the first ball is bowled in her town.

A visitor may lawfully use it in private. There is no lawful commercial supply for him to use. No shop, no counter, no window, no pharmacy line for a man on holiday.

What follows is this desk’s reading and not the Court’s. The nearest thing to a road into his hand that is not plainly dealing is a gift, for nothing, between adults, indoors. That sits on the contested edge of what the 1992 Act calls dealing in, it has not been tested on these facts, and nobody should treat it as settled. A man who landed on Tuesday does not have a friend in any event.

That is not a gap somebody forgot to close. That is the building.

Two Americans did the work in an afternoon

In June they had a football World Cup over there. Two state cannabis agencies, in Massachusetts and in New York, looked at the calendar, saw strangers coming, and wrote something down for them.

Massachusetts put up a page and told visiting fans, in its chairman’s own words, to avoid committing any dangerous plays this summer while enjoying the festivities. That is what a committee sounds like when it is honestly trying. New York’s agency told fans to access the legal market responsibly, to be discreet, to be good neighbours, to mind the families, and not to carry it out of the state.

That is the whole thing. A page. Some sentences. Nobody’s budget was harmed.

We have a year and a day. We have no agency. We have an Act that was signed and never switched on, a draft that nobody has answered in eight months, and a department whose own index cannot repeat a date its own notice already contains.

Somebody is going to have to write that page for Paarl. It will not be Pretoria.

What we ask

Forget the Act.

Not improve it. Not commence it with better numbers in it. Not add a friendlier threshold or a cheaper permit or a seat at the table where the permits get handed out. Forget it.

Cannabis is a crop. Treat it in law the way the State treats potatoes and maize and figs and honey. A woman sells fig konfyt at a farm stall and nobody comes to count her tree. A man sells honey off the back of a bakkie on a Saturday and nobody weighs his hives. Let the grower grow it and trade it, and let the State’s interest in the transaction stop at the tax on what he earns.

Quality sorts itself where it always sorts itself, which is the buyer coming back or not coming back. The grower who cures it properly is the one people return to. The chancer is finished inside a season. Where the State does insist on a licence, as it does with liquor, note what it licences. It licences the sale. It does not come into your house and count the bottles.

That is the ask. It is the same ask we have made before and it does not change because there is cricket coming.

What she needs, which is smaller than all of that

She is not waiting for an Act. She has a geyser and a bakkie and three rooms and a year.

What she needs by next October is one sheet of paper on the kitchen wall. What the law says, in the language she speaks. The three things she will not do, being sell it, give it, or fetch it for anybody. What a guest may do in a room he has paid for and what he may not do on her stoep where the neighbour is watching. A number to phone when a guest argues with her about it. And the flat sentence, in writing, that she is not a shop.

Nobody is going to post that to her.

So we write it. That is most of what a desk is for.

CannaStaySA is an information and advertising directory for over eighteens. It does not sell, supply, broker or facilitate the supply of cannabis, and nothing on it tells anybody where to obtain any. What it does is list the people who put sheets on beds in small towns. In October next year eight of those towns will have cricket in them and fourteen countries in the street outside, and the person answering the question will be the woman with the linen.

Make it before they take it, Selah.