Let us be clear about the nature of the beast before it devours us. A government does not lie to you all at once. It lies slowly, beautifully, relentlessly, on a schedule, in the passive voice, with a signing pen in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other, with a baton and a bunch of keys in reserve. We have seen, this past year, an entire American industry get walked to the altar and left standing with its dick in its hand in its good suit while the State slipped out the side door with the bridesmaid and bottle of tequila, and I am here to tell you, from somewhere over the Atlantic with the taste of ash and cold coffee in my mouth, that the same long con is already thumbing through the departures board for a seat to Cape Town.

Consider Texas, that great swaggering republic of personal freedom, where everything is BIGGER and where they will sell you a Winchester faster than a Big Mac. The legislature wrote a friggin’ jackboot of a bill called SB 3 to ban THC, the Governor vetoed it, and for one glorious, shining afternoon the freaks and the veterans danced in the sunshine and believed they had won. They had won fokol, nothing. The ban arrived anyway, not through the front door where a man could fight it head-on, but through an executive order and a quiet rule change, and by the last day of July 2026 the smokable hemp was gone off the shelves as though it had never drawn breath. That is the tell. When they cannot ban you in daylight, they do it in the fine print at midnight after free rounds at the hotel bar.

Then Washington, that marble mausoleum on the Potomac, redrew the very definition of hemp so cleverly that roughly ninety-five percent of the products fall into illegality on the twelfth of November. And when the howling grew frenzied and loud, did they rush to repeal it? They did not. Fuck you Tony! Why should they? They slid a slimy delay into a spending bill, a must-pass thing nobody reads, buying a few weeks until the eleventh of December while leaving the lab-made cannabinoids to die on the original date. A reprieve with a switchblade folded inside it. They will stand at a podium, accuse you of carnal actions with swine, and call this mercy. Smoke and mirrors.

And Florida, God help Florida Man, where more than half the living, breathing electorate, fifty-six percent of them, voted yes to legal cannabis in 2024, and it failed. Failed. Because somewhere a rule decrees you need at least sixty, not 50.1%, and a majority is merely an opinion when the House writes the arithmetic. Trulieve, the biggest cannabis company in the state and one of the biggest in the US, a multi-state operator out of Quincy that already owns the Florida medical market the way the cops and robbers own violence, shovelled in more than a hundred and forty-four million dollars of its own money, because the outfit that already runs the medical shop stands to inherit a whole nation of new customers with hungry lungs the day the recreational door swings open. This was not charity, it was a commercial bet with a ballot number. And the winnings would be disgustingly HUGE. A president blessed it, and yet it died in the counting, and now they are back for the 2026 ballot to feed the machine all over again and pray the machine is hungrier for democracy this time.

The industry had been promised the Moon, the whole shining catalogue: endorsements, rescheduling, banking (Whaaat? Really?), the works. By 2026 they stood out in the rain trying to fire a joint with the rescheduling stalled and a hemp ban bearing down, muttering the only phrase that still fit, fuggin’ trojan horse. I do not say the man in the White House betrayed them; I say the promise did what promises do in that town, they evaporate the instant they touch power. Even the long prayed for victory, the move to Schedule III, now sits in a locked cell with the lights off, cranked sex offender in the corner, snagged in a contested hearing while the industry sues for nothing grander than the lowly right to keep hoping and toking legally. And the people, the actual bums-on-seats people, are reduced to the oldest and saddest gesture in the democratic hymnbook: the fuggin’ pathetic petition, signing their names in a digital ledger to beg for the thing that was legal the day before yesterday. Incredulous much? Fuckers…

There is a shape to all of this, and it is older than cannabis, older than the republic that keeps rediscovering it. It is the ancient reflex of the State to promise liberty in the campaign and administer control in the statute, to give promises to win at the ballot, and take back with the bumbling bureaucrat for sale once ensconced in office, with a smile and a shrug. Dodgy fucks. What America is teaching the world this year, in six ugly lessons, is that prohibition never truly dies. It learns. It adapts. It puts on a lab coat and a compliance officer’s lanyard and strolls back in through the regulatory door speaking the soft language of safety and “think about the children” and the supply chain. Follow the money.

And here is the part the podium never mentions, the punchline that makes the whole grim arithmetic pay out. When the state fumbles a legal market, taxes it into the stratosphere, gates it behind licences and bans the cheap accessible corner of it, the demand does not evaporate. Demand never evaporates. It simply goes looking for a supplier who requires no permit, and there is always such a supplier, many both within and outside of the border. Every clumsy ban and every supermajority trap is, in the final accounting, a subsidy to organised crime, a gift wrapped market handed to the syndicates and the cartels who are eyeing this pending revenue stream with the patient, hungry calm of pirates-in-suits “business” men who have done this type of thing before, and made bank. Prohibition does not defeat the trade. It only decides who gets rich from it, and it never chooses the farmer.

So here is the warning, South Africa, and I mean it the way a sloshed friend means it when he is hollering from the end of the bar with his hands cupped round his mouth. You are about to do this very thing. You stood in the Constitutional Court in 2018 and won the right to your own private garden, a thing most of the planet still cannot say out loud, and now you are inching toward a commercial market under the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act and whatever omnibus the drafters are stirring in the pot. Arbitrary limitations and insane regulations. That is the exact doorway the Americans just walked through, and you have seen where that door leads. Do not let the licence become the leash. Do not let a commercialization framework quietly criminalize the very smallholders in the Pondoland kloofs, the Swaziland fields and Lesotho mountains who kept this plant alive for two centuries. The state did not pretend not to notice them. It noticed them just fine, and for the better part of thirty years it sent in troops and helicopters, some choppers even donated by the American DEA, to spray glyphosate on their grows, their food and their drinking water, on them. Death poison from the sky to kill a weed. They sprayed chemicals on people to murder a plant, the fuckers, and called it law enforcement. And do not, whatever else you do, hand that pending revenue stream to the syndicates, because South Africa’s own crime networks are flush with cash, legally and technically astute and already circling the coming market, and a framework that shuts out the smallholder does not close the trade, it merely signs it over to the cartel. And for the love of everything green, do not let your genetics walk out of the country in a coat pocket the way Durban Poison did, until the only surviving record (apparently) of your own landraces is a foreigner’s laboratory’s spreadsheet. You have even maybe already lost Rooijbaardt. Consider yourself warned, first by history and then by an oke with ash in his mouth.

Which brings us to the unglamorous part, and the necessary one, because somebody has to keep the receipts. Somebody has to sit in the archive while the politicians rewrite the definitions overnight and write down what was promised, what was grown, what was ours, and where the bodies of the good intentions are buried. That is the whole reason CannaStaySA exists. Not to sell you a gram, we do not and we will not, that is not our role, but to be the record and the map: the directory of who is real, the library of what the law actually says this shifting week, the calm place where a grower in the rural Eastern Cape and a curious traveller from Berlin or Seoul can both find the truth without a marketing department breathing down their necks. Call it a watchtower with good manners. In an industry built on promises that dissolve on contact, an honest information platform is not a luxury. It is the last line of defence.

So watch the fine print. Watch the midnight rules, the supermajority traps, the mercy with a hidden blade behind it. Trust the plant, which has never once lied to anybody, and trust the growers who have carried it this far, and be extremely careful of anyone who arrives with a pen, a podium and a sudden warm feeling about your freedom. The Americans found out the hard way. South Africa still has the rare luxury of finding out the easy way, which is to say by reading the map before wading into the swamp. There indeed do “be monsters” out there. We will be here, keeping the lights on and the records straight, when you get to the far side.
Make it before they take it.
Selah. JBS.