ANOTHER VOICE murray swart Don’t break it ... fix it

ON MONDAY, four men were sentenced to a collective 45 years in jail for making a business out of selling weed.

While there were plenty of years taken off their sentences, you and I will be buying all their meals, putting a roof over their heads and supporting their every need for a long, long time.

This conviction in the Prieska Regional Court was welcomed by the Northern Cape’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, with Hawks head honcho Major General Galawe hoping that it sent a clear message to drug dealers to “refrain from killing our nation with drugs”.

Firstly, among the drug dealers that are killing our nation are those who are standing in the way of legalising cannabis. They are doing so by withholding medicine that might actually work for sick people.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that cannabis is a miracle cure for all ailments under the sun, but there is a fair share of indication that it has the potential to do some good.

How much good, you ask? I don’t know. Nobody can say for sure, but they are looking into it.

We would have known more but you see, the problem is that it’s been illegal so researchers couldn’t research.

Instead of putting dagga to good use, it was taken away from the doctors, who profit from prescription pills.

The herb went from the healers to the hoodlums, from cure to crime.

It may be a crime against humanity that cannabis has been demonised, but this quartet from Prieska are anything but martyrs for a noble cause.

No matter how misunderstood and miraculous the effects of your product might be, if you are breaking the law, you are committing a crime. Therefore you are a criminal.

There is a saying that “crime doesn’t pay” but there are plenty of scumbags, many in Parliament, who clearly didn’t get the memo from behind the wheels of their luxury vehicles.

When you are more concerned with profit than patients, you are not a doctor. You are a drug dealer, irrespective of what you have in the frames on your wall.

What really bit the foursome in the ass was not the fact that they were selling weed. It was the fact that they were knowingly and willingly breaking the law in the pursuit of profit.

Its an offensive law but it is still a law and when we start picking what legislation to abide by and which not to, the system fails.

It’s an all-or-nothing scenario. If you don’t like something, do what you can to change it but don’t defy it in the belief that you should be exempt to the consequences of your actions.

Making something a crime makes it the domain of the criminals.

However, when enforcing a law is more harmful than the crime it is preventing, things need to change.

Do these four deserve to spend nearly half a century in jail for selling dagga?

Yes.

They broke the law. Committing a crime makes you a criminal and criminals belong behind bars.

Should selling dagga be against the law? Absolutely not but that doesn’t mean the law should be broken. It means the law should be fixed.

For now cannabis remains illegal but hopefully this will soon change, especially since the illegality of cannabis is what is really killing our nation.