Dear Editor,
I attended government’s public “consultation” on the decriminalisation of marijuana in Port of Spain on Wednesday evening to make a contribution as a cultural and medical anthropologist.
The keynote speaker was Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Faris Al-Rawi. He gave a long, two-hour PowerPoint lecture in the latest style of his leader, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley.
Doubling as the moderator, Al-Rawi managed the time badly, leaving little time for public contributions. He highlighted more of the dangers of using ganja than its medical, agricultural, employment, commercial, export and cultural benefits.
It was a monotonous, statistically-based lecture meant more for university graduates than the general population for whom it was intended.
At the audience microphone, Rastafarian Claude Jeffers summed up the whole exercise appropriately: “All that talk and talk, it started to give me ah headache. Is ah good t’ing I smoke before I come.”
Lol.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Kumar Mahabir