At the recent Generation Next Awards I learnt that only 44% of young adults think marijuana should be illegal and I’ll assume that the other 56% think otherwise, the following day on Saturday the 09th of May, thousands and thousands of people marched through the streets of Cape Town demanding the legalisation of marijuana, for recreational use and not just medical use. This morning I woke up to a video of Andre du Plessis from the Cannabis Working Group (the South African equivalent of NORML)sparking a joint on national television, a big fuck you to the law in my opinion, because although the conversation about decriminalisation is ongoing, marijuana is still illegal, well…at the time of publishing this article. Now…here is my coming out of the closet moment, I used to smoke pot, a lot, I can’t smoke anymore because I had primary pneumothorax, meaning my right lung collapsed because of smoking weed and had it been my left lung that collapsed I would have had an instant heart attack and died, contrary to the Rasta belief that ganja can’t kill you.

I am not bashing marijuana here, I… like one of my favourite writers Hunter S Thompson have always loved marijuana and “it has always been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years, I still think of it as a basic stable of life, along with beer” to borrow from Dr Gonzo. I have also been lucky enough to experience a high-end cannabis cuisine, I am talking a king crab with a diced cantaloupe and sweet avocado puree infused with marijuana, the best gourmet weed dinner imaginable. I also totally understand that we should be exploring the therapeutic potential of marijuana, the industries which can create and grow with hemp, I appreciate those endless possibilities, I am just worried about what we are going to legalise next. I don’t know if you remember but at some point abortion and gay marriage were illegal, and still is in many parts of the world but that will change, not only because that’s a sensible thing to do but because those movements will grow and grow and bring about that change, that’s what happens when people get together and challenge the status quo, we saw what happened with Cecil John Rhodes’ statue.

In fact, some of the most brilliant minds in the world like the Professor of Economics at Harvard University Jeffrey Miron are already debating the legalization of all drugs, meaning cocaine, heroin, Nyaope etc, and I think it’s important to mention that people who are leading that debate are some of the most influential people in academia and in politics because if it was just druggies and junkies fighting for the legalization of all drugs, most of us would look at them funny and easily dismiss them, at worst we’d call them retarded. Jeffrey Miron and his cronies are arguing that in a totally free and democratic society, people should have the liberty to do what they want as long as they are not harming anyone and that, by illegalising drugs we are not eliminating the drugs, we are driving the market underground, and as we all know, the underground market is violent, corrupt and impossible to control and regulate. Now, if this “legalise all drugs” movement catches momentum, and it most likely will, soon cocaine and heroin will be legalised much like marijuana, but, what would that mean then? I am all for social reform and moving away from obsolete legal frameworks, I discourage cultural taboos that keep the human race stagnant in its development, BUT shouldn’t we chill out a bit with the legalisation of this or that?