ACCRA, Ghana - Abolishing cannabis prohibition emerged as a key recommendation at the Ghana’s Critical Cannabis Moment workshop, as participants called for cannabis policy to center the interests of communities that have cultivated, used and traded the plant for generations. Their aspirations should not be compressed into the legalizationist language of licensing, investment and regulated markets when those terms obscure the actual possibilities communities seek to create.
The workshop was convened in Accra from Sept. 9-12 by the Transnational Research Centre on Emerging Drugs Markets and hosted by Loughborough University at the Accra City Hotel, with support from the West African Drug Policy Network and International Drug Policy Consortium and funding from Open Society Foundations. Activists, farmer groups, representatives from government agencies such as NACOC, FDA and Cocoa Board, as well as cannabis licensees examined experiences from Morocco, Colombia and South Africa.
The inadequacy of existing models soon became apparent. Cat Parker, former executive director of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cannabis Regulation warned Ghana against adopting a U.S. cannabis model that places commercial profit ahead of communities. She called for expungement of cannabis convictions, farming opportunities for people previously criminalized and an end to what she called a “a war on people disguised as a war on drugs.”
Legalization prioritizes the interests of capitalist speculators over that of the everyday users, sellers and growers. Beyond suggestions to reconsider the 0.3% THC threshold, prevent corporate concentration, channel indigenous cannabis production into the state-regulated domestic market, and otherwise enable community participation in the legal economy, what stood out was the abolitionist emphasis on the centrality of the indigenous marijuana culture’s own socio-economics.
There was agreement that cultivation and exchange which already provide livelihoods, particularly for young people and women in farming communities has to be protected and preserved. The disillusionment with legalization was quite obvious as the much-promised returns from a multibillion-dollar medicinal and industrial cannabis market have proved to be empty words. In the global North and South, pre-legalization projections of jobs, investment and improved conditions for communities affected by prohibition have only been followed by licensing barriers, corporate concentration, and continued persecution of the marijuana community.
Removing cannabis from the penal code is what ends the confusion. Ghana’s ‘critical cannabis moment’ offers an opportunity for a clean break: moving the conversation from state permission to the primacy of community self-regulation. The people who sustained cannabis culture through prohibition are the ones who are best positioned to determine what comes next.
