Unravelling the confusion over dagga
ON MARCH 31, the Western Cape High Court gave the green light to the private use of dagga (marijuana) at home.
What people fail to understand is that the court ruled that the possession, cultivation and private use of marijuana should not be forbidden in homes but that the commercial production and trade in marijuana was illegal.
The court also ruled that Parliament had two years to change sections of the Drug Trafficking Act and the Medicines Control Act.
The Constitutional Court still has to confirm the ruling and send it to the National Assembly. Until then, private use is still illegal.
Many people confuse the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation. The important difference is that decriminalisation takes away monetary penalties and jail sentences for simple possession.
It doesn’t cover the use, sale or storage for which there will still be criminal penalties. The focus is less on penalisation and more on the treatment of drug use.
Legalisation means you can acquire, possess and use a drug without fear of criminal prosecution.
It is safer to decriminalise marijuana than legalise it, so that the necessary help can be given to people dependent on it and state resources, in the form of court time, expenses and prisons, won’t be burdened because of marijuana usage.
Pro-marijuana activists use the angle of its medical benefits.
Yes, it has medical benefits but we need to consider the harm – just as we see the legalisation of many prescribed medicines such as codeine, morphine, pethidine, sleeping tablets, methadone and suboxone, sold freely in pharmacies and causing dependency problems for users around the world.
The addiction to prescribed medication is worse than some illegal drugs. Alcohol is a socially acceptable drug in a liquid form and is legal, but consider the devastating effect it has on society, with road accidents, the abuse of women and children and addiction arising from it.
The arguments of antidrug personalities centre on the idea that legalisation or decriminalisation would lead to increased use, be of great harm to children and cause incalculable misery in families.
If this is the case, why don’t we want to learn from our past experiences and not repeat the same mistakes? If we want to use marijuana for medical reasons, then pharmaceutical companies should make medical marijuana available online in the form of cannabis oil, tinctures and capsules.
It is true that THC, the primary active chemical, can be useful for treating some medical problems.
Synthetic THC is the main ingredient in Marinol, an Fdaapproved medication used to control nausea in cancer chemotherapy and to stimulate appetite in people with Aids.
The irony of the people promoting the legalisation of medical marijuana is that most are not using it for medical reasons but recreation.
They want to smoke it all the time and live with a false sense of reality, but are not using it for medical conditions like glaucoma, asthma, to alleviate the symptoms of nausea, loss of appetite and pain, fibromyalgia or when undergoing chemotherapy.
However, marijuana as a smoked product has never proven medically beneficial and is much more likely to harm one’s health; marijuana smoke is a crude THC delivery system that also sends many harmful substances into the body.
As an expert on addiction, I see the devastating effects of marijuana regularly with people as young as 12 becoming dependent.
The use of marijuana has adverse health, safety, social, academic, economic and behavioural consequences.
Yet, astonishingly, many people view the drug as harmless.
The widespread perception of marijuana as a benign natural herb seriously detracts from the most basic message our society needs to deliver.
It is not okay for anyone, especially young people, to use this or any illicit drug.
Marijuana became popular, mainly among the youth, in the 1960s. Many of them have become the parents and grandparents of the teenagers who now smoke marijuana, believing it is harmless.
But most of the marijuana available today is much more potent than the weed of the Woodstock era, and its users tend to be younger than those of the past generation.
Today, young people live in a world vastly different from that of their parents and grandparents.
Children these days are bombarded constantly with pro-drug messages in print and on screen. They also have easy access to the internet, which abounds with sites promoting the wonders of marijuana, offering kits for beating drug tests, and, in some cases, advertising pot for sale.
Meanwhile, the prevalence of higher potency marijuana, like skunk, chronic, hydroponic, greenhouse, outdoor or cheese measured by the levels of the chemical delta 9 (tetrahydrocannabinol or THC) is increasing.
Average THC levels rose from less than 1% in the mid-1970s to more than 6% in 2002. The more potent marijuana grown under hydroponic conditions increased to more than to 13%, with some samples containing THC levels of up to 33%.
This explains why we are seeing more young people being admitted to treatment centres for addiction to marijuana compared to a few years ago and exhibiting signs such as psychosis, paranoia, depression, memory loss, distorted perception and anxiety.
Pro-cannabis activists don’t want to accept that it is considered a gateway drug and claim that this is a myth, but one simple experiment will prove them wrong: go to every treatment centre in the country and ask all those admitted what their first drug was. About 95% will admit it was marijuana.
Many who worry about the dangers of heroin, cat, crystal meth or cocaine are less concerned about marijuana or consider experimenting with it an adolescent rite of passage.
Such attitudes have given rise to a number of myths in popular culture. Media often glamorises and shows the gratuitous use of marijuana, trivialising the risks and ignoring negative consequences.
Special interest groups proclaim smoking marijuana is not only harmless but good medicine. As South African musician Ray Phiri of Stimela, said: “Who is fooling who?”
• Jeewa is an anti-drug activist, motivational speaker, radio presenter and owner of the Minds Alive Wellness Centre in Westville.