EDITORIAL: The sacramental use exemption
Unsurprisingly, the Lower House of Parliament on Friday passed the Sacramental Cannabis Bill that, according to its objects, when enacted into law, “[will] provide for the [lawful] sacramental use of cannabis by an adherent of the Rastafarian religion in association with other persons of the same religion…”
This policy is in keeping with the currently accepted doctrine in regional jurisprudence that the consumption of cannabis by members of the Rastafarian religion, primarily by smoking it, is a central tenet of the manifestation and practice of their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of conscience and that to disallow and even criminalise its use by members of that faith would be akin to unreasonably infringing their fundamental right to religion.
Interestingly enough, however, as the front page headline in Friday’s issue of The Barbados Advocate proclaims, official permits will be needed in order for Rastafarians to consume cannabis, even when doing so as part of their faith. This is according to Clause 4 of the Bill in its current form that provides:
“A person who is responsible for the administration or management of a place of worship may apply to the Minister for the grant of a sacramental use permit to allow persons of that religious body to use cannabis for sacramental purposes at that place of worship.”
Given that this provision amounts in substance to a prior restraint on what should be enjoyed as a fundamental freedom, according to the poetics of rights, we may expect a soonest challenge to this provision as constituting an unreasonable limitation on the freedom guaranteed to embers of the sect. After all, it may be reasoned, those established religions that serve alcoholic wine as their form of sacrament do not have to apply for a liquor licence from the authorities.
Moreover, while the official permit may be viewed by some as a necessary policing of the consumption of cannabis, especially since we are now existing in a mixed system that requires a fine distinction to be made among medicinal and sacramental use, which are legal; and purely recreational use that remains criminal, yet the Bill purports to permit the public consumption of the herb by Rastafarians while, bizarrely, prohibiting its use in the privacy of one’s home. According to Clause 6 (4) of the Bill relating to an exempt event for which a requisite permit has been granted:
A permit granted under subsection (2) shall give permission for persons attending the exempt event to:
(a) use cannabis in the public place being used for the event;
(b) transport no more than 12 grammes of cannabis to the public place being used for the event; or
(c) supply or give cannabis for sacramental purposes at the event.
Nevertheless, according to the Honourable Attorney General who piloted the Bill through the House on Friday, as quoted in another section of the local press, “It is a significantly different thing for people who are gathered together as a congregation to enjoy a right without putting a court or the judicial system into the awkward position of trying to determine what it is they are doing, as compared to an individual who in the privacy of their own home wants to do the same thing...”
To our minds, this appears to convert what may be read as an individual constitutional right into a merely collective one; in other words, a right that exists only when it is exercised in concert with others and not alone.
We leave for further public discourse the issue of whether Clause 6 (4) now prioritises the public smoking of cannabis over that of tobacco and, as we have already noted in this space, whether a society that is hard pressed to police so many aspects of existing social anomie will be able effectively to make the nice distinctions required here.