Go out to Bathurst in February and look at the pineapples. Hectare upon hectare of them, more pineapple than a man could eat in nine lifetimes, and not one poot konstabel or officer of this Republic has ever driven out there with a scale in the boot to establish whether the farmer has crossed some threshold into pineapple criminality and become a “pineapple dealer”. Go to the Free State in April and stand in the maize until you cannot see the end of it. Zero “maize dealers”. Go to the Hex River Valley and look at the grapes and understand while you are standing there that you are looking at thousands of hectares of New Testament party wine, which is to say thousands of hectares of intoxication, sitting in the Sun, waiting, and no man from the state has ever weighed a single bunch of it. Not one “grape dealer”.

Now go home. Open your cupboard or fridge. Understand that if there is a jar or bag in there and the jar is too heavy, you are a criminal. Or Heaven forbid, you grew 50 plants instead of 5, and the narc’s jackboot is poised. “Dagga dealer” is your crime. Seriously?

Hold those facts in your head at the same time until the outrage arrives. It should arrive. If it has not arrived yet, you have lived too long in a country that has trained you to receive absurdity the way you receive weather.

The State Already Knows Exactly Where the Line Goes

Here is what makes this unforgivable rather than merely stupid. The state knows, just as noses know good zol from average. It knows precisely where the law belongs, it has known for the better part of a century, and it has the filing cabinets and prison cells to prove it.

The grape is free and the bottle store is licensed. That is the entire architecture and it works. They raid a shebeen for what crosses the counter, never for what is in the fridge, and they do not raid the house next door at all, though its fridge may be fuller and its cellar fuller still. A man in Stellenbosch may sit on ten thousand bottles and we call him a collector. A man in Mpondoland may sit on ten kilos of his own plant and we call him a dealer. Nobody has ever weighed the collector. The offence is the sale. It was always the sale. And yet the collector may sell, may bequeath, may insure, and the dagga farmer may do none of it. The state does not care what is in the fridge, it cares what happened across the counter, and this distinction is so old and so thoroughly settled that we have stopped noticing it was ever a choice.

Shakespeare’s pound of flesh memories anyone? Shylock’s bond named an exact weight too, and Portia did not beat him by calling it cruel, she beat him by holding him to the number, a pound and not a scruple more, and not one drop of blood, because no quantity written into a bond has ever yet been cut out of a living man without taking something the drafter forgot to account for. Seven hundred and fifty grams is that bond, and the blood is the water in the plant, the size of your house, the aphids, the worms, the locusts, the month you cut, and the discretion of whoever in uniform happens to be holding the scale.

Tobacco, the same. You may grow the plant. The law is waiting at the factory door and at the till, where the excise is, where the money moves, where the state has an interest a reasonable person can recognise as an interest. Recognise doesn’t imply consent. On what that interest is based is another story entirely.

And it charges for the privilege with a perfectly straight face. R902 for a hemp permit. R25 200 for a medicinal licence. It has the price list printed and laminated. It knows how to meet you at the point of commerce, it has an entire department for it, it has written a Master Plan about how much it would like to meet you there. And then, having demonstrated that it understands perfectly well where the regulated moment sits, it climbs into your fucking cupboard with a scale, searches your mother’s bathroom cabinet and your dad’s boot. Makes a criminal of the landrace farmer in Mpondoland and the tannie in Durbanville, and every teenager in-between.

The Instrument Cannot Do the Job

Set the morality down for a moment and just look at the tool they have chosen.

A weight cannot see a sale. It has no capacity to see one. Put seven hundred and fifty grams on a counter and it will tell you seven hundred and fifty grams and it will tell you nothing else in this world: not where it came from, not where it is going, not whether a single Rand ever changed hands, not whether the person standing behind it is a grandmother with ruined hands or the last soft link in a chain that runs somewhere ugly. It measures water. It measures the calendar. That is the whole of its testimony, and it was never going to be more. It can never be more.

They have press-ganged an instrument calibrated to measure water, and they now stand around looking puzzled when it reports nothing anybody needed to know. Yet prosecution follows, despite Justice Zondo saying we are free to grow at home.

The transaction was always the only fact that mattered. Every single thing the state says it is worried about, the sale to the child, the unlabelled bottle, the untaxed trade, the man selling poison out of a boot in a parking lot, every one of those is an act, and acts leave evidence behind them. The sale. The supply. The scale on the counter rather than in the shed. The price list. The stock rotation. The messages. The money. This is not exotic police work. This is a Tuesday. And they send out teams of investigators in unmarked cars, with video cameras, marked notes, helicopters and machine guns. Seriously?

Weighing is what you do instead of investigating. It is the shortcut of a system that would rather hold a number than build a case, and be clear about who pays for that shortcut, because it is never the guilty. The dealer keeps his stock light and moving; it is his whole profession, he has grown very rich off it, and will do anything for it to continue. The man guilty of nothing worse than having a love for the Plant, a GreenThumb and a good season keeps everything in one place, in his own house, in the open, where a scale can find it in ninety seconds. He is staring at a 15 year sentence, because the minimum sentence regime kicks in the moment somebody values his cupboard at more than R50 000, and valuing a cupboard upwards is not a difficult thing to do. WTF?

Possession Is a Condition. Commerce Is an Act.

Now the part I actually care about, and I would like it heard properly.

There is a difference between a state that regulates what you do and a state that regulates what you have, and the difference is not technical or academic or a matter for the drafting committee. It is the entire distance between a citizen and a line item.

When the law attaches to an act, you are answerable for a choice you made. You could have declined to make it. You remain, in the eyes of the law, the author of your own position, which is the minimum condition of being treated as a person at all. When the law attaches to a quantity, you are answerable for a condition. For a state of being. For the contents of a room on a particular afternoon. There is no choice anywhere in it, only the brute fact of what was in the house on the day the van came up the road. As arbitrary as the konstabel having a dentist appointment on the 5th or the 15th.

A state that weighs your cupboard has stopped governing you and started taking inventory of you. It has decided that the private life is a warehouse it holds the keys to, and that idea has never in the history of this or any other Republic stayed where it was first put. It gets into everything. It becomes the ordinary resting posture of the state towards the person, and the person, being adaptable and tired and busy, learns to live smaller than he is. This was not in the Prince judgment, quite the opposite. Yet they have mangled this thing to suit their myopic view.

That is the real harm here, and it is a great deal bigger than dagga.

What We Are Actually Asking For

Not chaos. Nobody sane is asking for chaos, and I am tired of chaos being handed to us as the only alternative on offer. And our beautiful land has plenty kaos.

Regulate the sale. Licence it, label it, test it, tax it, keep it away from children, and prosecute the man who sells to a fourteen-year-old with everything the state has in the armoury, same as they do with alcohol. Put the full apparatus at the counter, in the light, where it belongs and where it demonstrably works and where the state has already proved across a century of liquor and tobacco that it knows how to operate. The economies of scale will shake the chaff from the distaff in no time. Pineapple beer, home stills, anyone can do it. But do they?

Then get out of the cupboard. No ceiling. No scale. No number. If the state believes a man is dealing, let it prove that he dealt, the way it is required to prove everything else, with evidence and effort and a docket assembled by somebody who did the work. And if it cannot prove it, then he was not dealing, and the correct quantity in his house is however much he grew. End of story. Klaar.

That is not a radical position. That is the pineapple position. It is how this country already treats every other thing that comes out of its own ground, and cannabis, whatever else anybody wants to say about it, is a thing that comes out of the ground, hence weed.

Who Wins

The enforcement machine wins under the draft as it stands, because a scale demands no thought, no docket, no investigation, no judgment and no courage. Low-hanging fruit. Easier to get your stats up from a bust in the suburbs than going into Western Road and hitting the real criminal orcs and goblins eating society from the arse up with real drugs like tik and black tar heroin. It converts a hard question into a light on a display. The attorneys win, because an incoherent rule is an annuity. And the large, licensed operators win quietly, because every gram of confusion in the private lane makes the regulated lane look like shelter, and fear is the cheapest marketing anybody ever bought.

Who Loses

Ultimately, we all lose. Even the konstabel, eventually. Everybody whose harvest is bulky and whose house is small. The grower who cuts in March and is holding four kilos of wet plant matter to dry on clotheslines in his garage or spare room, for a fortnight, through no fault of his own and no intention of anything other than smoking what he grew. The woman making oil for her sick mother, who cannot find out whether her grow is lawful because nobody who wrote the rule bothered to say. And the man in the Transkei whose family has grown this plant since before the committee’s grandparents drew breath, who was not consulted, was not in the room, was not thought of, and who will be the first one weighed, charged, imprisoned.

Put the Hand Where It Belongs

On the counter. In the light. Where money moves and the state has an honest and defensible interest and the rest of us can watch it work, pay our way and get on with our lives. Not in the cupboard. Not in the fridge. Not in a drying shed at the end of a dirt road with a torch and a scale and a young constable who has been handed a number instead of a reason, promised promotion for punishing peasants.

Nobody weighs the mielies. Nobody has ever weighed the mielies. Nobody ever will. Make them explain, out loud and in public and in language a farmer can follow, why they are weighing this. Not duces tecum, we are not in a courtroom yet. A PAIA request for the record of decision: who chose seven hundred and fifty, on what evidence, on what day, and who in that room said the number out loud first. Insist on it.

Make it before they take it.
Selah. JBS.