EDITORIAL: A changing debate

IN a delicious amalgam of metaphors, a former Foreign Secretary of Britain, Mr. Ernest Bevin, once cautioned, “If you open that Pandora’s box, you never know what Trojan horses will jump out…” Interestingly enough, he was speaking about the prospect of Britain joining the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the European Union, currently another story in itself.

Closer to home, his is a caution that might also be addressed to the Honourable Attorney General of Barbados after his announcement last week of the proposal for the local Rastafarian community to cultivate cannabis lawfully for sacramental use and purposes. Of course, this provision will require either a textual amendment to the Medicinal Cannabis Industry Bill, currently under parliamentary debate, that does not advert to this development, or the processing of an entirely new Bill.

Further, to our best knowledge, the primary mode of Rastafarian consumption of the herb is by smoking it, a form hitherto officially declared taboo when medicinal use only was being contemplated by the governing administration.

And while we recognise that there may be cogent arguments that the current statutory prohibitions impact unconstitutionally on the guaranteed right of any member of that community to manifest and propagate his or her religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance, the new deviation from the purely medicinal use by creating an exception for sacramental purposes further increases the likelihood of complete legalisation, especially since too close an official oversight of the legitimacy of sacramental use might itself be deemed an unreasonable interference with the individual freedom of conscience.

In any case, are we prepared to make a rational distinction between sacramental and recreational use of the herb? It is for this reason that we titled this editorial as we did, for what was formerly a debate on medicinal use only, and that solely for commercial purposes, has now seemingly morphed into one of what exceptions may be carved into the previously declared policy of absolutely no legalisation of recreational use.

We have already heard the argument of the Rastafarian community that their use of the substance may also be deemed medicinal, even though as we argued earlier, the previously expressed policy did not contemplate consumption by smoking. May their sacramental use now be officially regulated within the guarantee of the supreme law?

Another matter that concerns us is the contagion that may possibly ensue from permitting one segment of the society to cultivate and consume marijuana other than through medically certified prescription, while it remains criminal for anyone else to do similarly. This will require a level of policing and enforcement to which we have not so far been privy, as witness our struggles to contain illegal gun importation, the seemingly intractable private PSV sector and the indiscriminate dumping of garbage, among others.

It seems to us that we are not-too-skillfully avoiding the needful discourse that should take place. Our existing treaty obligations entail that we should criminalise certain activities associated with the controlled substance, and while the existing legislation did contain room for a medicinal use exception and the jurisprudence does suggest an infringement of the constitutionally protected religious freedom, these two exemptions have served to place firmly in the public domain the $64 million question – Should we decriminalise in some way, as others have done, or legalise its use altogether?