Three Thousand in a Week
The convictions fell off a cliff eight years ago. Nobody seems to have told the front door.
By Puff 'n Post | Law & Compliance
The week
In the week of 7 to 13 September the police ran a national operation and arrested 18 488 people. Of those, 3 385 were for alleged drug possession and 318 for alleged dealing.
The number went out in a press release, got picked up by a few titles, and disappeared by Wednesday. Nobody made anything of it because there is a number like it most weeks and after a while a number that arrives every week stops being news, which is roughly how you get away with things. And the powers-that-be know this all too well.
Here is another week, so that nobody can tell us we picked a bad one. From 13 to 19 July, same operation, 17 583 arrests, of which 3 113 for possession and 320 for dealing.
Two weeks, seven weeks apart, both over three thousand for possession, both around three hundred for dealing.
We are not going to multiply that out by fifty-two and give you a headline number for the year. We have read two weeks. There are fifty other weeks we have not read and for all we know some of them are quiet, others festive. But two weeks that look this alike are not a blitz, they are a routine, a pattern, and a routine such as this is something you should know about. Don’t say we didn’t tell you.
What that sits next to
The National Prosecuting Authority secured 5 575 drug convictions in 2024/25. That is the whole year, every drug, every court.
In 2017/18, before the Constitutional Court ruled in Prince, it was 156 158. We have written about that collapse elsewhere and it is the best evidence this country has ever produced that letting people alone does not bring the roof down on Chicken Licken.
Put the two side by side. One week of arrests for possession is more than half of an entire year of convictions for every drug offence in the republic. The maths is not math-ing.
What an arrest is when it isn’t a conviction
Most of those arrests are not going to end in a conviction. The conviction figures say so plainly enough. Somewhere between the van and the court the great majority of them come apart, and that has been the pattern for years now.
Which raises a fairly obvious question about what the arrest was for.
Because an arrest is not nothing. It is fundamentally a gross violation of rights. Practically, it is an overnight at the State’s request, usually. Branded a criminal and herded into a cell with the night’s trawled detritus. It is a phone call to somebody who was expecting you, your wife, Mom, or boss. It is a car left on the verge where you were stopped, vulnerable, and a set of fingerprints that would otherwise have never been taken, and a docket with your name on it, and a weekend gone, and quite often a Monday gone too because you are somewhere waiting rather than at work. Then several back-and-forths to court, consultation, court. It is a conversation with an employer that you will be having for reasons you would rather not explain. None of that gets undone when the case goes nowhere. There is no form for getting your life back. Nowhere to reclaim legal fees.
So the punishment is happening. It is just not happening through a court. It is being delivered at the roadside by whoever is standing in front of you on the day, and then the file quietly dies six months later and nobody writes that down anywhere. But they got their stats. They want promotion. Keen beans.
That is not how the thing was designed. A magistrate is supposed to be the reason a man loses a night, not an afterthought that never arrives because the very system is fucked.
Now the part that should make you angry
None of this is happening because nobody told the police.
Weeks after the Constitutional Court ruled, the National Commissioner of the day issued a directive telling officers to stop arresting people for the private use, cultivation or possession of cannabis. A further directive followed in January 2019: where an officer is in doubt about whether what he has found is for personal use, he must not arrest. Register a docket. Proceed by summons. Court date, not a cell.
Except that the 2018 directive also told members to exercise their discretion as to whether cannabis was possessed for personal consumption, taking into account all relevant circumstances “including the quantity of the cannabis found in possession of the person”. Which hands back, in one clause, everything the instruction had just given away. If the quantity decides it, and nobody has defined the quantity, then the officer decides it, and we are exactly where we started.
It did not take.
So in August 2023 a different National Commissioner issued a national instruction on arrests for cannabis-related matters, and this time somebody wrote it in words a child could follow. No arrests are to be made for personal and private cultivation or possession of cannabis. And, in the same breath, because whoever drafted it knew exactly what was going on out there: no arrests merely to meet predetermined targets.
Read that second one again. The national head of the South African Police Service had to put in writing, formally, on the record, that his own members must stop arresting citizens for a lawful private act in order to make their numbers look better. Statistics. The fuckers.
That instruction goes further. It says a summons or written notice must be considered before an arrest is made. It says officers should liaise with the prosecuting authority about whether a matter will even be enrolled before they arrest or seize anything. It says a search and seizure warrant should be obtained beforehand. And it requires that every member be shown the circular and sign for it, and warns that failing to comply may result in disciplinary steps, which tells you that the man who signed it already knew his own instructions have a habit of evaporating somewhere between head office and the charge desk.
It did not take either.
In December 2024, sixteen months later, the South African Human Rights Commission had to write to the National Commissioner of Police about the National Commissioner of Police’s own instruction, because the complaints were still coming in, particularly from the Rastafari community, who have been carrying this since before most of us had an opinion about it. The Commission put it plainly: the arrest or prosecution of adults for private use, possession or cultivation of cannabis is inconsistent with both the law and national operational directives.
A constitutional body had to write to the author of an order and ask him to please get his own staff to obey it.
That is not an implementation problem. That is an organisation that does not consider itself bound by its own paperwork, in a country where the Constitutional Court has already spoken, and it has been going on for eight years while everybody involved collects a salary.
One more thing out of that 2023 instruction, and it is the hole the whole thing sits over. The police concede in it, in writing, that there is no definition of personal consumption. None. Not in the statute, not in the judgment, not in the instruction itself. And then they warn their own members that arresting without one exposes the service to civil claims for unlawful arrest and detention.
They know. They wrote it down. And the vans still go out.
A word on that last part, because it is the only practical thing on this page. If you were arrested for private personal possession, in a private place, as an adult, the service’s own instruction says that should not have happened, and its own instruction says what the exposure is. Claims like that are brought in this country and they succeed. We are a directory and not your lawyer and this is not legal advice, so go and speak to an attorney about your own facts rather than to a website. But do not let anyone tell you that a bad night is just a bad night.
Two things are true at once, and we are not going to blur them because it would suit us. A directive is an instruction to staff. It is not a shield, and it will not stop a torch in your face at two in the morning. The people who have spent a decade getting South Africans out of police stations say so in terms, and they are right, and whatever you have read in a WhatsApp group about arrests being suspended, the document is a management memo and not a licence.
The part we have to be straight about
These are drug possession arrests. All drugs. Not cannabis arrests.
The published figures do not break it down by substance and we are not going to pretend they do. Plenty of people on that list were picked up with things that have nothing to do with a plant in a garden.
We will say it again at the end, because it is the first thing anyone hostile will reach for and they should find we got there first.
What we can say is that an adult with his own cannabis, in his own private space, for himself, commits no offence in this country and has not since September 2018. So somewhere inside those weekly numbers are arrests that should never have been made, and nobody can tell you how many.
Here is the part that should bother you. They used to count it.
In 2015/16 cannabis possession made up sixty-five per cent of all drug-related arrests in this country. That is not our estimate, it is what was reported off the police’s own numbers at the time, and on the same basis somewhere around two hundred thousand people were being arrested a year for having it.
Then the Constitutional Court ruled, and the cannabis share stopped appearing. Eight years on, the weekly totals come out on time, every week, broken down by possession and by dealing and by a dozen other offences, and not one of them tells you how much of it is a plant.
We have looked.
Why it keeps running
Partly because nothing has replaced it.
The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act was signed in May 2024 and still has not commenced. It needs a proclamation from the President and there has not been one. That is two years and four months of a statute sitting on a shelf.
The draft regulations went into Government Gazette 54061 on 2 February 2026, notice R. 7067, comment invited by 5 March. They are still on the Justice department’s own invitations page. Released 3 February 2026, no closing date next to them, two hundred and thirty-four days and counting.
That page also carries three other consultations from the same department. Released 7 August, closed 11 September. Six weeks, in and out, done.
The cannabis draft had a date too. The Minister told Parliament this month that it was 5 March, that comment closed on it, and that the regulations were revised afterwards. It simply never made it onto the page where a citizen might go looking.
Parliament’s committees have not taken cannabis up since 18 August, which is thirty-eight days. Individual members have. Two written replies came back this month, one from the police about seizures at a border post and one from the Minister of Justice about convictions and expungement, and the second of those is the first account anybody in government has given of how this Act is actually supposed to start.
The Minister has now said what the hold-up is. The regulations are finished and were revised after the public comment. Before they can be gazetted, Parliament has to approve them. Only then is the President advised to bring the Act into operation, and nothing anywhere sets a date for any of it.
And the weekly operation runs on regardless, and the number comes out, and nobody in any of those buildings appears to have noticed that the two things are connected.
What we want, so you know where the reporting stops
Everything up to here is what the record says. This next part is ours.
The draft regulations work in grams and plant counts. They decide whether you are a citizen or a suspect by weighing what is in your house.
A threshold does not protect you. A threshold is a reason to go through your pockets, because going through your pockets is the only way anybody finds out which side of it you are on. And the pockets are the harm. The court date you never get is not what took your Saturday.
So we are not asking for a better number in the regulations. We do not want a friendlier register, a bigger allowance, a nicer inspector or a place in the queue for a permit. We want the Act forgotten.
And somebody should say the obvious thing out loud, because eight years on nobody in any of those buildings will.
The war on drugs is over. Cannabis won.
It won in 2018 when the Constitutional Court said an adult may do as he likes with it in private. It won again in the conviction figures, which fell from 156 158 to 5 575 while the sky stayed exactly where it was. It won in every township, every suburb and every farm in this country where people carried on regardless for a century. The State lost, comprehensively, on its own numbers, and the only people who have not been told are the ones still writing dockets.
What is left is not a war. It is an occupying force that has stopped believing in the cause and keeps patrolling anyway, because the vans are already bought and the targets are already set and nobody has had the nerve to send it home.
So send it home. Let the farmers farm. Free the plant. And let every clerk who has built a career on weighing it go and do something useful.
Cannabis is a crop and the law should treat it like one. Potatoes, figs, honey, olives. A woman sells fig konfyt at a farm stall and nobody registers the tree she picked it off. Let a man grow it, let him sell it to the neighbour who wants it, tax what he earns, and leave the rest of it alone. Liquor is licensed at the till and nobody has ever come to count the vines in your garden.
Dealing is a criminal offence today. Nothing on this page says otherwise and nothing on this page is advice to behave as though it were not.
If you are coming here
People read pages like this before booking, so, plainly.
An adult may use cannabis in private in South Africa and has been able to for eight years. The same country arrested over three thousand people for alleged drug possession in a single week this month, across all drugs, and has never published how many of those involved the plant.
Both true. Anyone selling you only one of them is selling you something.
So use your head. Private means private, and it means the place as much as the act. Do not carry anything through an airport in either direction, whatever your own country allows. Do not put anything in a car that is not yours. And do not assume that lawful and uncomplicated are the same word, because in this country at the moment they are not.
If you want a bed where the house rules are written down and the host is not going to look at you sideways, that is the reason this directory exists at all.
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.
And once more: those are drug possession arrests, all drugs, not cannabis arrests. The cannabis share was published before the judgment and has not been published since. After eight years that starts to look less like an oversight.
Make it before they take it, Selah.
