The number

In the year before the Constitutional Court ruled, the National Prosecuting Authority got 156 158 drug convictions.

In 2024/25 it got 5 575.

That is the whole article and you can stop reading if you want. Everything after this is where the number came from and what it does to the argument.

Where it comes from

GroundUp ran it on 27 March 2026, with the chart done by The Outlier. They took it out of the NPA’s own annual reports, which is to say the State counted itself and then published the count and then nobody looked at it for a while.

The run goes like this. 156 158 in 2017/18. Then Prince lands in September 2018. Then 41 404 in 2018/19. Then 46 876 in 2019/20. Then 13 570 in 2020/21, which is the year everybody was locked in the house and the courts were half shut, so leave that one alone. Then, by 2024/25, 5 575.

Two things have to be said before anybody uses that.

The first is that these are drug convictions, all of them, not cannabis convictions. The reports do not split it out. So this is not a count of dagga cases and nobody should pretend it is.

The second is that the NPA’s reports for 2021 to 2023 did not carry complete drug conviction figures. There is a hole in the middle. GroundUp says so on the page, which is more than most people do.

Fine. Take both of those on the chin and the number still does what it does. A drop from 156 158 to 5 575 is not a trend line. It is a category of prosecution more or less ceasing to exist.

The other column

Here is the bit that will annoy the people who told you the sky would fall.

Convictions for everything else did not collapse. They went up. 170 591 in 2019/20, and 178 009 in 2024/25.

So the courts did not stop working. They stopped doing that particular thing.

For scale: in 2009/10 the NPA got more than 239 000 convictions in total. It has not been near that since, and GroundUp puts that down to the Authority still trying to climb out of what was done to it in the Zuma years. That is a different article and it is not ours.

What it was for

Think about what 156 158 means as a working week.

Every one of those is a docket. A statement. An arresting officer writing something down. A prosecutor reading it. A magistrate looking up. A person standing in a box, usually young, usually poor, usually with nobody in the gallery. A record that follows him to every job application for the rest of his life because a man had something in his pocket.

A hundred and fifty-six thousand of them, in one year, in a country with the murder rate we have.

Nobody in this country was ever short of serious crime to prosecute. They just kept doing the easy one.

Then a court said an adult in private may do as he likes with the plant, and almost overnight the easy one stopped being available, and the number fell off a cliff, and the sky did not fall, and the other column went up.

That is what eight years of evidence looks like. It is the strongest argument this country has ever had against its own drug policy and it was sitting in an annual report.

Which is why the rest of it is nonsense

Private use is lawful. An adult, in private, for himself. Prince, 2018.

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act was signed in May 2024 and has never started. It needs a proclamation from the President and there has not been one. The draft regulations went into Government Gazette 54061 on 2 February 2026, notice R. 7067, comment invited by 5 March. As at this morning they are still sitting on the Justice department’s own invitations page, released 3 February 2026, with no closing date next to them. Seven months and ten days. Three other consultations from that department opened in August and have already closed.

Dealing is still a crime and nothing here tells you otherwise.

Now the line, and everything after it is what we want rather than what is.

Those draft regulations are built on grams. On plant counts. On the idea that the thing the State should measure is how much a citizen has.

That is the exact machine that produced 156 158 convictions in a single year, rebuilt slightly smaller and painted a nicer colour. It is a weighing scale with a statute attached. Give a man a threshold and you have given him a reason to search you, because the only way to find out which side of the line you are on is to go through your pockets.

Grow as much as you like. On your own ground, for yourself, and sell it to your neighbour if he wants it, and pay tax on what you earn, and that is the end of the State’s interest.

Potatoes. Maize. Figs. Olives. Honey. A woman sells fig konfyt at a farm stall and nobody registers the tree. A man sells honey off a bakkie and nobody counts the hives. Liquor gets licensed at the till and nobody counts the vines in your yard.

We are not asking for a friendlier threshold. A threshold is the problem. We want the Act forgotten.

If you are coming here

A lot of people read pages like this before booking a flight, so here it is plainly.

You are coming to a country where an adult may use cannabis in private, where the prosecution of drug cases has fallen by something like ninety-six per cent in seven years, and where commercial sale is still not lawful and the statute meant to sort that out has been sitting unsigned into force for over two years.

That is not a free-for-all and it is not a police state. It is a country that stopped doing something stupid and has not yet worked out what to do instead.

Do not bring anything through an airport. Do not take anything home. Your own government’s advice on that is better than ours and every one of them says the same thing.

CannaStaySA is an information and advertising directory. Over eighteen only. We do not sell cannabis, supply it, broker it, or help anybody else do any of that, and there is nothing on this page that tells you where to get any. What we do is tell you who has a bed, in which town, on which night, and what the law actually says before you arrive. You talk to the host yourself.

One hundred and fifty-six thousand. Then five and a half.

Somebody should have put that on a billboard.

Make it before they take it, Selah.