Ruling on dagga complete nonsense
● Legal to smoke in own home, Constitutional Court says
With all the hype over the Constitutional Court’s ruling in allowing the consumption of dagga in private, it left me wondering: what are the ideological implications of this socalled “landmark” ruling?
Or is it just window-dressing to bluff us into legitimising the status quo?
Criminologists in the marxist tradition of a critical theory of society have long argued that capitalist states, such as SA, strongly prioritise policing the petty crimes of the poor (such as smoking dagga) to enable the rich and powerful to get on with what they do best.
This trick aims to keep the public occupied and entertained on senseless narratives (the “crimes” committed by the poor) while enabling the privileged to amass enormous wealth and power at the expense of the vast majority who are fitfully unaware of the game’s true parameters.
This does not mean that the rich and the powerful do not commit crime – on the contrary, only that their behaviour receives minimal scrutiny.
The idea is to keep cycling offenders in and out of prison to bolster and perpetuate the illusion that the system is “working”, alive and well.
The poor (who are often unrepresented in court and generally ignorant of legal niceties) are easily moved to plead guilty to crimes of irrelevance (such as petty theft, consuming soft drugs or public indecency) compared to the monstrous crimes of the wealthy and the powerful, which go unnoticed.
The poor are vastly overrepresented in our prisons, while the rogues’ gallery (the Gupta club and friends in government) will in all likelihood never be brought to trial.
Similarly, vested interests kept dagga on the list of prohibited substances.
One of my students suggested in a study that the pharmaceutical industry managed to keep the consumption of dagga, an ancient African medicinal practice, illegal for many years so as to boost the sales of its own products.
Who will buy herbicide poisons (according to the World Health Organisation probably carcinogenic) now that there is no need to kill the dagga fields in the Eastern Cape around Lusikisiki, where it grows abundantly?
The decriminalisation of the possession of dagga belies the fact that the criminal justice system is turned on its head. As police minister Bheki Cele himself admitted in an unguarded moment, the cops have “dropped the ball” and our society has devolved into a “war zone”.
Scholars such as Jeffery Reiman coined the term “the Pyrrhic defeat” to explain this astonishing state of affairs.
Whereas a “Pyrrhic victory” is a victory achieved at such cost as to be a victory in name only, the criminal justice system’s fight in a society such as SA is a Pyrrhic defeat – where the state is well aware of the fact that it has lost the fight against crime – but this is no big deal since it never intended to win the war.
This “defeat” of the system serves its purposes perfectly.
The intention is to ensure defeat so as to channel public attention to the crimes committed by the poor.
As further proof of their argument (despite Cele’s mock concern), criminologists in the marxist tradition point out that during the second half of the 20th century, a phenomenon known as “total capitalism” emerged.
This is something which Marx could arguably not have foreseen as minimalist government was popular during the heyday of the British Empire (hence the appeal of postmarxist thinking).
The result of total capitalism on the cusp of the 21st century is that states in the global south (the developing third world such as Brazil, India and SA) have lost all sense of control over their national policy formulation.
Business has come to dominate national policy-making.
National governments have their policy dictated to by transnational corporations, which increasingly roam the globe in search of new resources to exploit, or markets in which to place their produce or use their services.
Admittedly, though, capitalism can also be protectionist, as US President Donald Trump demonstrated.
One of SA’s foremost philosophers, Bert Olivier, contends that in a so-called age of post-coloniality seething with localised decolonisation frenzy, it is worth considering transnational corporations’ insidious global colonising moves.
Admittedly, though, the Constitutional Court ruling could also be seen as a form of decolonisation. (Truth is rarely simple.)
The task of the nation state in the 21st century is convincing the electorate by every means possible that kowtowing to business interests coincides with national interests, even though it clearly does not.
Consider how the ruling party clandestinely outsourced the government’s most lucrative business (notably the Sassa grants scandal) to the private sector.
As a comparative criminologist in the post-marxist mould, I have no doubt that the Constitutional Court’s decriminalising dagga consumption is fraught with irony.
It legitimises the status quo of a seriously fractured society – in which the wholesale criminalisation of the state has fused with business completely – and the court’s ruling is, in this carefully calibrated context, complete nonsense (if not altogether irrelevant).
Dr Casper Lötter
Port Elizabeth