New political party A New and United Guyana (ANUG) has joined calls for the legalisation of marijuana for recreational and medical uses and according to one of its founding members, Timothy Jonas, such a move will reduce the burden on the justice system and ease overcrowding in the prisons.
“The small step of legalising marijuana possession and use would be celebrated by the majority in our society as the removal of a tiny mote of repression, and the lifting of an unfair aspect of the judicial system,” the attorney said in a letter, which was published in Monday’s edition of the Stabroek News.
Jonas later clarified that the legalisation he speaks of captures both recreational and medical use of marijuana.
In his letter, he said two enormous problems in Guyana are the overload of the criminal justice system and extreme overcrowding in appalling conditions in the country’s prisons. “One of the myriad causative factors is our approach to marijuana offences,” he said, before pointing out that the reality in our society is that marijuana use is widespread.
“The stigma associated with cocaine use does not attach to marijuana, and far less moral culpability is associated with smoking weed. The Rastafarian community has campaigned futilely against successive governments to legalise cannabis. In rural areas, marijuana cultivation is widespread, and the large number of unemployed youth pass their idle hours by getting high. There could be more harmful ways for them to respond to their joblessness. In urban areas, marijuana is increasingly seen and used for recreational purposes by folk who turn up to work punctually every day and are productive members of society,” he wrote.
Jonas pointed out that despite this reality, the justice system imprisons citizens for marijuana possession, even in small quantities. “This draconian nonsense does not match the perceived offence in the eye of any right-minded Guyanese, and shows an alarming disconnect between our society’s mores and the mores of the lawmakers sitting in Parliament. No citizen who is in touch with the reality of our society sits easy with the knowledge that the neighbour’s twenty-year-old son has been put away for three years because he was caught with some weed in his pocket. The law is unfair,” he stressed.
He further pointed out that because the system is so harsh, a person charged with possession is not likely to appear in court to simply plead guilty. “When faced with the possibility of prison, that person will make every effort to fight in court to avoid a conviction, placing pressure on the court system to hear the trial, with time spent in adjournments, gathering of evidence, police witnesses and prosecutors, appeals, and the overload of the court system,” he said.
He explained that if the person is convicted, the real possibility is that “our taxpayers’ dollar will have to pay the expense of supporting that person in prison for a number of years.” He added that dozens of youths are in prison for nothing more than marijuana possession, and the prisons, already overcrowded, become unnecessarily more crowded as a result.
He said that by utilising the single step of legalizing marijuana, “dozens of pending actions before the Courts would be removed, and the overload of the Court system would be in a small measure relaxed. With that single step, dozens of youth languishing in our prison system could be reprieved, relieving the prisons in a small measure of its problem of overcrowding, and relieving the taxpayers of the cost of their maintenance. Those youth could hopefully be returned to the society without the stigma of previous criminality.”
Jonas said, too, that if marijuana cultivation and possession were to be legalised, the farms would be subject to regulation and taxation. “They could be monitored, and could pay licensing fees. Shops selling marijuana would pay taxes on those profits. In California, Canada and the Netherlands and recently closer to home in Jamaica, marijuana has been legalised and is becoming a large revenue earner. What is wrong with Guyana?” he questioned.
He stressed that ANUG supports the call for legalisation of marijuana in Guyana, and will do everything in its power to ensure that this is done. The party will be officially launched today.
Meanwhile, government parliamentarian Michael Carrington said on Monday that the Narcotics Drug and Psychotropic Substances (Control) (Amendment) Bill in his name is still on the cards.
The bill, which seeks to soften penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana, has been listed on the order paper since December, 2015.
Carrington could not say when the bill will be debated but he assured that his party, AFC, still wants to get it to that stage.
This newspaper has been told that the indecisiveness of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) has stalled the House’s consideration of the bill. APNU is the he main component of the governing coalition,
AFC Executive Cathy Hughes said in June last year that APNU has joined forces with the party and will support a bill later in the year.
“We are quite excited. There is a pending Cabinet memo, whereby we recognise that the APNU has now come on board and is supporting our position regarding the reducing of penalties with regards to marijuana,” Hughes had told a press conference.
“We are excited that there is movement and there is some understanding and we are able to come to a common position,” she added.
Her announcement came a month after President David Granger signalled in Jamaica that his government would move towards a lessening of sentences for small amounts of ganja. He was in Jamaica for the CARICOM Heads summit, where the decriminalising of possession of small amounts of ganja was on the agenda. Prior to Granger’s statement in Jamaica, APNU had not stated its support for lightening sentences.
