Go and read section 4 of the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act. It takes four minutes and it will spoil your morning.

Subsection (4) says that any person in possession of cannabis, in a private or a public place, “in an amount which exceeds the maximum amount prescribed for private purpose”, is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a fine or five years in prison or both. Subsection (5) says the same thing about a person who cultivates plants exceeding “the maximum number prescribed”. Subsection (8)(a) says it again about transport.

Three crimes. Five years apiece. Now look at what is actually in them.

Not harm. Not intent. Not supply, not sale, not a child, not a neighbour, not a complainant, not a victim. Not conduct of any kind. Take the word prescribed out of those three subsections and there is nothing left standing. They are not offences with a quantitative element bolted on. They are quantities with a prison sentence attached, and the quantity is not in the Act. It is somewhere else, in a document that has not been made yet.

That is the whole architecture. The State did not write a law about what people do with this plant. It wrote a law about arithmetic and then left the sum blank.

And the blank cannot be filled without a vote

Here is the part nobody has written, and this desk has been as slow to it as everybody else, because the answer has been sitting in a free PDF for sixteen months.

Section 6(1) of the same Act says the Minister must make regulations prescribing those maximum amounts. Must, not may. So the blanks are not optional; the Act does not work until somebody fills them in.

Then comes section 6(2)(b), and it reads as follows, in full, exactly as it appears in the gazetted Act:

“Any regulation made in terms of paragraph (a) and subsection (1)(a) or any amendment thereto must, before publication in the Gazette, be approved by Parliament.”

Subsection (1)(a) is the maximum amounts. The ones the three offences are made of.

So the sequence written into this statute is that the Minister makes the regulation, Parliament approves it, and only then does it go in the Gazette. Not the Minister signing it. Not the department publishing it. Not a gazette notice on a Friday afternoon. A vote.

The subsection is awkwardly worded, and we are going to say so rather than pretend otherwise, because a reader with a copy of the Act will notice within a minute. It says “paragraph (a) and subsection (1)(a)”, where any sensible reading needs an “or”, and on a strictly literal reading it would catch almost nothing at all, which cannot be what was intended. We are not a court and we are not going to pretend to settle it. What we will say is the thing that survives either reading: subsection (1)(a) is named in that provision expressly, by number, and subsection (1)(a) is the possession and cultivation limits. However you construe the “and”, those two numbers are inside it.

Which means the 750 grams and the five plants are not a near-miss. They are a bill before Parliament that nobody has tabled

In February the department published draft regulations for comment. They are in Government Gazette 54061 under R. 7067 of 2 February 2026, and this is what they say:

“The amount of cannabis that may be possessed by an adult person in a private place for private purpose may not exceed 750 grams at any given time during the course of a single day.”

“The number of cannabis plants that an adult person may cultivate in a private place for private purpose may not exceed 5 cannabis plants at any given time.”

Those two sentences have been argued about in this country for eight months. They have been the subject of a national newspaper headline telling South Africans they may hold 1 500 joints. Lawyers have written explainers about them. This desk has written about them. Clubs have planned around them. Growers have worried about them.

And they are regulations under section 6(1)(a), which means on the face of the Act they cannot be published in the Gazette until Parliament approves them.

The draft itself, which runs to a notice and a set of regulations and recites that the Minister made them in terms of section 6, does not mention Parliament anywhere. That is not an accusation of anything. A draft published for comment is not the final instrument and there is no reason it must recite the approval step. It is worth saying only because eight months of public argument about two numbers has gone by without anybody pointing out that neither number can become law without a vote that has not happened.

Two accounts out of the same department, and the Act says which one was right

In August a senior official of the Department of Justice stood up at the National Cannabis Dialogue and described how this would go. Revised regulations would be published. The Act would be gazetted. The Act would become law. Asked about the consequential amendments to the drug legislation he said it would all be done through the Act. He finished by saying the department was confident the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act would come into law this year.

In September the Minister answered a written parliamentary question and said something different. The regulations had been finalised, they had been revised in light of the public comments, and they require approval by Parliament before publication in the Gazette, after which the President would be advised to put the Act into operation.

Those are not the same sequence. One of them has a vote in it and one of them does not.

Read section 6(2)(b) and the Minister is right. That reply is the subsection in almost the same words. Which means the account given from a podium in August, by somebody whose department wrote the Act, left out a step that an Act of Parliament requires, and nobody in the room appears to have said so.

We are not naming him and we are not calling it dishonest. People summarise, reporters compress, and we hold one publication’s account of what was said in a hall. What matters is not who got it wrong. What matters is that the only version with the vote in it is the correct one, and the correct one is considerably slower than before year end.

Because this is where the trail stops, and we went and checked properly rather than assuming.

The parliamentary monitoring record is the fullest public account of what Parliament actually does, and we searched it on the Act’s own name across the whole of 2026. It returns seven items. Three are departmental annual performance plan or stakeholder meetings at which the Act came up in passing. One is a public hearing on an entirely different Bill. One is an oversight report about the Eastern Cape. One is the written reply quoted above. And the seventh is the February call for comment on the draft regulations itself, which that record attributes to no committee at all, because it was the department’s own consultation, with submissions going to an official’s email address, closed since the fifth of March.

Not one of the seven is Parliament being asked to approve anything. Narrow the window to the five weeks since the first of September and the Act’s name appears exactly once, in that written reply. Search the plain word cannabis over those same five weeks and you get three results, every one of them a written answer to a parliamentary question, and not one of them about regulations.

Set that beside the 2020 to 2023 record on the same system, where every single consultation on the Bill is logged against a named committee of Parliament. The Bill went through Parliament. The numbers that fill in its blanks have not been near it.

Then we went to Parliament’s own record, which is a different thing from the monitors’ and which settles it.

Every sitting day Parliament publishes a document called the Announcements, Tablings and Committee Reports. It is the formal register of what was laid before the Houses that day and what the committees reported. It is not journalism and it is not a summary. It is the thing itself. We read every one of them from the first of July to the sixth of October, forty-seven documents, something over four hundred and forty thousand words of parliamentary business.

The word cannabis does not appear in any of them. Neither does dagga. Neither does hemp. Neither does the phrase private purposes. Three sitting days in July and August could not be opened, and all three fall before the Minister’s letter, so they cannot bear on the question. Across the window that matters, from the day she wrote to the most recent sitting day, the register is complete and the plant is not in it.

Nothing tabled. Nothing reported. Nothing referred.

So this is not an inference from quiet in the press. Eight months after two numbers were published for comment, and nearly three weeks after a Minister told Parliament in writing that Parliament has to approve them, Parliament’s own register of its own business has not mentioned this plant once.

Meanwhile, in a courtroom in Cape Town, a judge said thirty-five days

The second half of this is shorter and it rhymes with the first.

On the fourteenth of April this year the ministries responsible for policing, trade and agriculture arrived at a hearing in the Western Cape High Court without having filed their answering affidavits. The application in front of the court is an urgent one, brought by Garreth Prince, whose case produced the 2018 judgment every adult in this country now relies on, together with a Rastafari body and a group of small-scale farmers, and it asks that court to declare this Act and the hemp regulations constitutionally invalid. It is in two parts, the first seeking urgent interim relief including a halt to arrests for private use and an order that plants not be destroyed without judicial oversight, and the second carrying the constitutional attack.

The respondents asked for the matter to come off the urgent roll. The acting judge refused, and put a clock on it instead: twenty days to file the affidavits, a further fifteen for heads of argument, and the matter set down for the eighth of June.

Twenty and fifteen is thirty-five. Count thirty-five days from the fourteenth of April and you get to the nineteenth of May.

It is now the seventh of October. That is one hundred and forty-one days past the day the last of those papers was due, one hundred and twenty-one days past the date the matter was set down to be argued, and one hundred and seventy-six days since a judge of the High Court looked at the State, declined its request for more room, and said that this was urgent.

No judgment has been reported. We checked the published index of that court’s 2026 judgments again this morning and there is nothing in it involving cannabis, dagga, hemp or this applicant. We do not have a case number, because none has appeared in any report we have been able to find, and we say so plainly because it is the largest hole in everything anybody has written about this matter, ours included.

So: the one institution in this entire apparatus that set a deadline, wrote it down and refused to be talked out of it was the court. And even the court’s deadline turned out to be a suggestion.

The part where we tell you what we do not know

We do not know what has happened in that matter since July, when a commentator recorded that it had been postponed again and reassigned to a new judge. We do not know whether papers were eventually filed, whether anything was argued, or whether some order exists that has never been reported. There are accounts going around. We have seen them, we have gone looking for a second source for them, and we have not found one, so they are not in this piece and they will not be until somebody shows us a document or a court tells us.

And on the merits of that application we say nothing whatsoever. Not whether it should succeed. Not whether this Act is invalid. Not what a judge ought to do with it. The matter is live, we are not a party to it, and a live matter is reported and not refereed. That is not timidity. It is the difference between a publication and a nuisance.

Who actually pays for a blank in a statute

Delay is always discussed as though it costs nobody anything. It costs the people standing in the gap it leaves.

The third applicant group in that case is small-scale farmers, and the exclusion of traditional growers from the lawful economy is one of the things the application complains about. While the blank stays blank, those growers stay exactly where they have been since 2018, holding the genetics that made this country’s name in this plant and watching the industrial version arrive without them. Last year a growers’ association in the Eastern Cape went public to say that hemp seed was being pushed into their district without consultation and that cross-pollination would wreck landraces their families have held for generations. Their position was seven words long, because nobody was reading their submissions.

And every adult in this country is still relying on precisely what they have relied on since September 2018, which is a reading-in by the Constitutional Court protecting an adult who uses or possesses cannabis in private for personal consumption in private. That reading-in contains no quantity, no permit, no register and no inspector. It is the whole of your protection and it is still the whole of your protection this morning.

Note what that means, because it is the sharpest thing in this piece. The protection you have now has no number in it. The thing proposed to replace it is nothing but numbers. Eight years of work, and the direction of travel is from a standard to a scale.

Now the argument, and here is the join

Everything above is the record and the text of a statute. What follows is what this desk says, and you are entitled to know exactly where one stops and the other starts. It starts here.

Reading all of that, the natural reflex is to want the machinery to hurry up. Put the regulations to Parliament, get the vote, proclaim the Act, hear the case, and at least we would know where we stand.

We do not ask for that and we are not going to start.

A vote on 750 grams is still a vote on 750 grams. A finalised regulation is still a number with an official behind it and a five year sentence behind him. Proclaiming this Act would not free anything; it would convert an eight year silence into a permanent weighing station, and a plant that needs permission is not a free plant.

And section 4 is the proof, handed to us by the drafter. Three offences, five years each, and not one of them describes a single thing a human being does. You cannot reform that by choosing a kinder figure. The figure is the defect.

Cannabis is an agricultural product and it should sit in law exactly where potatoes, maize, figs, olives, honey and pumpkins sit. Nobody registers the fig tree. Nobody counts the hives. Nobody weighs a man’s grapes in his own bucket, and no statute threatens him with five years for having too many. The State’s interest in a grower’s trade should begin and end with the tax on what he earns.

Free the plant, and let the farmers farm.

The honest bottom line

Nothing in this piece changes what is lawful today, and nobody should read it as though it did. The Act is not in operation. Its three quantity offences cannot bite on anybody, because the amounts they refer to have not been prescribed. That is a reason to understand your position clearly, not a reason to feel clever about it, because dealing in cannabis remains a criminal offence in this country under other legislation entirely, and the private use protection has never extended to sale or supply. If you are waiting for a court or a gazette to make trading lawful, you are waiting in the wrong room, and the consequences of guessing wrong land on you and not on us.

CannaStaySA is an information and advertising directory, over eighteen only. We do not sell, supply, broker or facilitate the supply of cannabis, we do not run a club, and we are not your lawyer. What we do is tell you where the line is this week. This week the line is where it has been since September 2018, which is your own plant, your own private space, your own adult self, and nobody else’s money in it.

Three offences with nothing in them, waiting on a number that needs a vote that nobody has called. Thirty-five days, asked for by a court, and a hundred and seventy-six delivered.

Make it before they take it, Selah.

JBS
Puff’n Post, CannaStaySA