Rhon­dor Dowlat

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has ad­mit­ted that in the sev­en-plus months it has been in Gov­ern­ment, no time was spent ex­am­in­ing the de­crim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of mar­i­jua­na.

He re­vealed this yes­ter­day min­utes be­fore he left for a 12-day trip to the US, UK and Ghana.

He made the com­ment in re­sponse to a ques­tion on a T&T Guardian ar­ti­cle yes­ter­day, head­lined "AG looks at le­gal gan­ja", which sug­gest­ed At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi had start­ed the process of look­ing at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of de­crim­i­nal­is­ing gan­ja.

Row­ley said he would be sur­prised if Al-Rawi spoke to de­crim­i­nal­is­ing mar­i­jua­na de­spite the fact that it was not dis­cussed in Cab­i­net.

"I lead the Cab­i­net and I don't know that any such ex­am­i­na­tion is tak­ing place. I've seen the head­line, I haven't read the sto­ry but I'm pret­ty sure the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al will re­al­ly want to ex­plain that. We have been in of­fice for sev­en months and so what­ev­er con­ver­sa­tion gen­er­at­ed that head­line, there is cer­tain­ly some mis­un­der­stand­ing there," Row­ley said.

In the ar­ti­cle, Al-Rawi said Gov­ern­ment had be­gun sta­tis­ti­cal ground­work for de­crim­i­nal­is­ing mar­i­jua­na pos­ses­sion and was al­so re­view­ing the Dan­ger­ous Drugs Act. He al­so said a wide con­sul­ta­tion will be planned be­fore any pol­i­cy de­ci­sion is tak­en.

How­ev­er, Row­ley was adamant that de­crim­i­nal­is­ing mar­i­jua­na is not some­thing that the Gov­ern­ment is ex­am­in­ing at this point in time.

Asked whether it was some­thing the Gov­ern­ment would look at, Row­ley replied, "What hap­pens in the fu­ture we will deal with that when we get to it."

Speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia af­ter Row­ley left on his trip, Al-Rawi in­sist­ed he was speak­ing as At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and not on be­half of the Gov­ern­ment.

"I am the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al of T&T and it is quite sim­ple, the ques­tions posed to me by Gail Alexan­der were in the con­text of the work that's go­ing on in the prison sys­tem. Specif­i­cal­ly, the ques­tions were posed in the con­text of the max­i­mum sen­tenc­ing ap­proach and the is­sue that the Arch­bish­op has raised, which co­in­cides with the is­sue that we put in­to the pub­lic do­main of re­al­ly look­ing to see how peo­ple who are re­mand­ed have been man­aged by the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem," Al-Rawi said.

He said that sta­tis­tics were be­ing looked at, as one could not en­gage in the ex­er­cise of sen­tence ap­pli­ca­tions or treat­ment of re­man­dees on mar­i­jua­na pos­ses­sion mat­ters with­out look­ing at the sta­tis­ti­cal im­pact.

He ad­mit­ted though that he does not re­port every­thing that goes on in the Of­fice of the AG to the Prime Min­is­ter, in terms of ex­am­i­na­tion of ma­te­r­i­al or case by case as­pects nor does the Prime Min­is­ter or oth­ers en­gage in the same and with oth­er min­istries.