Editorial: The green boom in a legal vacuum

A national cannabis master plan has been developed, with the department of trade and industry tasked with its implementation and administration, but the momentum towards turning all of this into a reality, appears to have been lost in the build-up to the 29 May elections

Over the years, the Mail & Guardian has published a number of cannabis editions, occasional and often light-hearted attempts to present readers with insight into the world of cannabis, a plant to which South Africans now have legal access, after a prohibition of nearly 100 years.

In this edition — published to mark 4:20, an auspicious date on the cannabis calendar — we take a more serious look at the country’s cannabis industry, as it shifts from the illicit economy into the financial mainstream, and some of the people involved in it.

South Africa already has a flourishing legal medical cannabis industry, serving both the international and domestic market, with about 100 licensed operators having invested the R20  million necessary to enter it.

A still illegal, but above-ground, recreational market has established itself since the right to personal and private use of cannabis was affirmed by the constitutional court in 2018.

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill is finally before President Cyril Ramaposa and is awaiting his signature — six years after the constitutional court gave the state 24 months to do so.

It does not allow for commercial cannabis trade but it creates the conditions under which one can be created — and under which millions of much-needed tax rand can eventually be brought into the fiscus.

A national cannabis master plan has been developed, with the department of trade and industry tasked with its implementation and administration, but the momentum towards turning all of this into a reality, appears to have been lost in the build-up to the 29 May elections.

In the interim, the recreational or adult-use industry has pushed ahead, with cannapreneurs operating through legal loopholes with no regulatory framework in place — a financial green boom in a legal and institutional vacuum.

The consequences of the inertia on the part of parliament — and the government as whole — in playing its role in allowing the industry to transition to legality are already being felt.

The state has been deprived of  income, as have participants in the underground industry, who have been left behind by events of the past six years, the reparative aspect of the legalisation process forgotten in the scramble for the new, above-ground economy.