PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.chris­tisto­pher@guardian.co.tt

Op­ti­mistic af­ter Thurs­day’s an­nounce­ment by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al Rawi, cannabis ac­tivist Naz­ma Muller sat in the Par­lia­ment gallery as the AG laid two pieces of leg­is­la­tion in Par­lia­ment, the Dan­ger­ous Drugs (Amend­ment) Bill and the Cannabis Con­trol Bill, which will pave the way for the de­crim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of mar­i­jua­na.

The op­ti­mism with which Muller en­tered the cham­ber turned to out­rage as she left.

“I am try­ing to con­trol my anger and out­rage about what is be­ing done around Cannabis, one of the most amaz­ing and ben­e­fi­cial plants on the plan­et.

“I was ab­solute­ly dis­gust­ed by the de­liv­ery of the first read­ing of this bill,” she said af­ter leav­ing the Par­lia­men­tary cham­ber yes­ter­day.

Muller said: “Peo­ple will, of course be very glad, be­cause we’ve been re­pressed so long. The regime has been so puni­tive, so pro­hi­bi­tion­ist, that just this lit­tle glim­mer of no ar­rest, it seems to be some­thing to cel­e­brate,” but she was far from con­vinced that the bills were pro­gres­sive enough to fos­ter the de­vel­op­ment of a cannabis in­dus­try in this coun­try.”

“What the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al has in fact done is shack­led us. He is say­ing, on one hand, he is free­ing up the jails, he is free­ing up the po­lice ser­vice but at the same time with these claus­es, he is putting re­straints still on pro­duc­tion,” the ac­tivist said.

She felt that based on what had been de­vel­oped in for­eign ter­ri­to­ries, the ini­tial of­fer­ing from the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al seemed lack­ing.

“Look­ing at the pack­age of bills that the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al spent so long putting to­geth­er, the speed at which the Cannabis in­dus­try has been mov­ing—be­cause this plant has been used for thou­sands of years—and you know have the cut­ting edge tech­nol­o­gy be­ing used in Is­rael, the US, Cana­da, all through Eu­rope.

“We are so far be­hind in terms of re­search and de­vel­op­ment, prod­uct de­vel­op­ment,” she said.

“With these still kind of puni­tive mea­sures where a moth­er could be fined up to $250,000 for giv­ing her child cannabis. Where have we pro­gressed? In terms of the li­cens­ing? We know our pub­lic ser­vice, this is go­ing to be a whole set of red tape, how long is every­thing go­ing to take? It took Ja­maica four years to get to the point where it now has six dis­pen­saries. Are we go­ing to wait four years again? “

Her fear was al­so that the mat­ter was be­ing politi­cised.

To counter this she an­nounced that a new­ly-formed group—the Trinidad and To­ba­go Union of Gan­ja Farm­ers—will con­tin­ue protest­ing out­side Par­lia­ment every Fri­day.

“How do you tell a per­son, who has spent ten years in jail for cul­ti­vat­ing mar­i­jua­na he now has to get a li­cence, and he has to pay X amount for that li­cence? And he has to fol­low all these reg­u­la­tions and guide­lines?

“No sir, we’re not tak­ing that, we’re go­ing to fight this un­til we get to­tal le­gal­i­sa­tion. We don’t mind reg­u­la­tion and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and test­ing if they want to com­mer­cialise, but the av­er­age man on the street must be al­lowed,” she said.

Oth­er ac­tivists, how­ev­er, have re­served com­ment on the mat­ter un­til they learn more about the le­gal­i­sa­tion.

But yes­ter­day, Pun­dit Satyanand Ma­haraj of the Aranguez Unit­ed Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion wel­comed the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s ini­tial state­ments on the bill which he said “sig­nalled not on­ly the dis­crim­i­na­tion of cannabis but al­so the fa­cil­i­ta­tion of cul­ti­va­tion and mon­etis­ing of the herb.”

Ma­haraj, how­ev­er, warned the AG against us­ing cut and paste leg­is­la­tion from for­eign coun­tries which have not led to in­dus­tries be­ing re­alised.

“For ex­am­ple, in Ja­maica where de­crim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of cannabis has re­sult­ed in a free­ing up of the courts, the con­cur­rent cul­ti­va­tion leg­is­la­tion re­quires such ex­ces­sive de­mands that not a sin­gle li­cence has been grant­ed or gan­ja farm op­er­a­tionalised.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the leg­is­la­tion should not be so cum­ber­some in its re­quire­ments that on­ly the wealthy could af­ford to es­tab­lish a farm,” he said.