IT was all but lost in the ill-tempered squabbling that followed the controversial invasion of the National Assembly by riot cops, but this week Parliament accepted - without a single objection from MPs - a motion from the Economic Freedom Fighters that the House debate the nationalisation of marijuana.
Had the time finally come, we were wondering here at the Mahogany Ridge, to have that serious chat about dagga?
There are presently three quite different cannabis bills before Parliament - the most well-known being the Medical Innovation Bill, originally presented by the late IFP MP Mario Ambrosini, who used cannabinoid oils to treat his terminal cancer, and revived by the ANC chief whip, Stone Sizani, when it lapsed.
The bill aims to legalise the medical applications of cannabis. At least one pilot hospital programme, with patients receiving medical marijuana, is envisaged. Elsewhere, medical practitioners would be able to offer a variety of treatments that are commonly available in Europe and North America but were illegal here.
Recreational users - and we have a number of them at the Ridge - are wary of the bill as it says nothing about the production, regulation or distribution of medical marijuana products. Naturally, stoners have the usual fears about Big Pharma wiping out small neighbourhood growers and so on. This paranoia is often greatly exacerbated with a bong of such mutant strains as Feckweed or Bubonic Chronic. But that is another story.
The Cannabis Control Bill and the Relinquish Dagga Law Bill are more in keeping with the spirit of the EFF motion. The former proposes to strictly regulate retail and distribution to discourage monopolies and disempower black market trade. The latter, broadly, wants all prohibition of the drug scrapped, with the limits of public use the same as those imposed on tobacco products.
Judging by Deputy Speaker Lechesa Tsenoli's reaction to the EFF motion, it is unlikely that MPs would be giving these bills the sort of consideration their authors hoped they'd receive when they came up for discussion.
Giggling as if he had been at the whifty himself, Tsenoli said he was accepting the motion but with some reservations. "I am doing so because . . . in South Africa . . . uh, uh, some things are illegal so . . . the rules will be checked whether we are in the appropriate ranks to do this, but otherwise, there was no objection, so it will be recorded as acceptable."
The EFF, as if to signal a certain cultural authority in the matter, had prefaced their motion by reminding the House that it had been 33 years since the death of reggae star Bob Marley, who "will be remembered for promoting marijuana for recreational use and also for medicinal use."
By some strange coincidence - the weirdness of which depended on what you'd been smoking - at that very moment, half a world away, the guardians of the Marley estate were telling reporters that they'd allowed a private equity group the right to use the singer's name and likeness in a bid to exclusively mass-produce and market what Rolling Stone termed "a special blend of herb dubbed Marley Natural."
Thus the Coca-Colonisation of those "heirloom Jamaican cannabis strains" that Marley himself smoked - and the sad revelation that the sullying of a legacy is not the exclusive preserve of the Mandela family.
Those baldheads that the Marleys have teamed with, in this decidedly Babylonian venture, trade under the unfortunate name of Privateer Holdings.
Reggae fans will get the joke. Old pirates, yes, they certainly rob I. . .
It really does come down to the lucre. Marley continues to be a handsome earner. He was placed ninth on the most recent Forbes' list of top-earning dead celebrities, with his estate getting an estimated $20m in royalties from music sales and merchandise deals each year.
Recreational use of cannabis is now legal in four American states - Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon. More will follow. But already the US legal weed industry is estimated to be worth $50 billion - that's about R550 billion, or more than 2 200 Nkandla security upgrades - and that is reason enough for any government to reconsider decriminalisation. There is Swazi Gold in them there hills.
Will we legalise dagga? Probably not. We are a very conservative country, and prefer our poison to come out of a bottle. And besides, the very notion that adults be allowed the right to choose how they enjoy themselves is perhaps . . . foreign and unwelcome.
So prohibition will continue. It will make absolutely no difference. South Africans will continue to smoke dagga. Just as we will continue to waste money and police manpower by trying to enforce the unenforceable.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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