GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General
18 March 2025
The lack of a policy framework to organise and regulate South Africa’s cannabis industry since the Constitutional Court decriminalised its use – but not its sale – seven years ago is placing the future of the burgeoning industry, and up to a million people’s livelihoods, at risk.
The GOOD Party calls on the President to breathe urgent life into the work of the National Cannabis Masterplan (NCMP) Process, initiated in 2021 – and in the meantime prevail on his Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi to stay the edibles ban.
Minister Motsoaledi should know that colonial and apartheid authorities, who began banning the use of cannabis products in the 1800s to increase worker productivity, singularly failed to curtail the industry which, by 2003, was rated the fourth largest in the world by Interpol.
Incoherent decriminalisation does not work. Users of edible cannabis products have the right to know that what they consume is safe, which requires regulations, not a ban. Driving the industry underground does not enhance safety but achieves the opposite.
Because of the policy void, the field is being left open to politicians and bureaucrats of a conservative bent – including the Minister of Health – to do their best to throttle the industry and the vast majority of those livelihoods to death.
Due to policy uncertainty, tens of thousands of South Africans have been arrested for possession and/or sale of cannabis, only for 90% of those charges to be withdrawn. Given the rate of violent crime, extortion and corruption in the country, the police and Justice department’s resources used to carry out this work should surely be better deployed.
Due to policy uncertainty, the only beneficiaries of the decriminalised industry are a few hundred licensed businesses, a largely corporate middle-class constituency. There is zero beneficiation for traditional cannabis growing communities in parts of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, who have taken the risk of deriving livelihoods from the product for generations, despite it being illegal. Instead of being admitted into the mainstream economy, they are effectively re-shut out of the industry.
The elephant in the room is the absence of policy to regulate the sale of cannabis and/or hemp products.
Without policy coherence regulating sales, it becomes difficult for the likes of the Minister of Health to regulate the sale of edible products – and affords him the gap for their total ban. (Not to mention that it borders on lunacy for the President to trumpet the future of an industry (cannabis’ cousin, hemp), only for one of his ministers to ban its products which have been sold in mainstream stores for years.)
The number of South Africans involved in what is presently illegal cannabis production is difficult to estimate accurately, for the obvious reason that they are forced to operate beneath the radar. According to the Institute for Economic Justice, “by some estimates as many as 900,000 people may be engaged”.
To this number must be added the privileged few who work under the legal cover of officially awarded cultivation licences (a year ago, 102 cannabis licenses had been awarded across the country, as well as 371 permits to grow hemp), the investors and staff in what are presently unlicensed shops, and an unknown multitude engaged in the production and sale of cannabis products in legal and illegal shops, and on the streets.
Media enquiries: media@forgood.org.za