How Ridiculous Marijuana Legislation Is

June 2, 2010 by Taran Rampersad

Marijuana. It's a fact of life in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean - not to mention Latin America - or the rest of the planet.  And what got me on this less-than-politically-correct topic is an 80 year old grandmother who was arrested with two of her children and a niece, was allowed bail at $5,000. The 3 younger accused were granted bail at $40,000 each. For 22 grams of marijuana.

That's 5.5 grams each if it were equally split, and an average of $31,250 in bail per person.

I could wax poetic about all the stuff liberals say about marijuana, but that's not really the point. The point is that marijuana is a fact of life in Trinidad and Tobago - like it or not - and its effects are akin to that of alcohol. With less violence. But the violence comes in because to traffick marijuana, one has to be a criminal. And criminals have to play by a different set of rules. Violent rules. If the powers that be can demonstrate that cases regarding marijuana use have caused violent crime, I'm all ears. No, the violence is in the trafficking. Anyone who has experimented with cannabis knows that, and based on some of the things I've heard politicians say and expect others to believe it seems apparent that the wacky weed is embedded in politics.

So we clog up the courts with this sort of nonsense. Nowhere in the world has legislation regarding marijuana curtailed the use of marijuana. It's like what happened with Prohibition in the United States - it just went underground. The government doesn't make money on it because it doesn't tax it directly. Instead, they clutter the courts and waste taxpayer money with grandmothers who might really have glaucoma.

Huh?

In fact, I sincerely doubt that most people know the etymology of ganja. গাঞ্জা. That word is derived from the river considered holy in India: The Ganges. Really. 

And decriminalization of marijuana is happening around the world. Take Argentina, for example. It's simply a matter of people continuously ignoring the laws and the fact that the laws are largely impossible to enforce against a population that has demonstrated that it will do it anyway. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on decriminalization of marijuana. You might be surprised.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the majority of Police reports on 'drug busts' seem almost always to be related to marijuana - but marijuana isn't the problem. Cocaine and its derivatives are. But how often do the police actually curtail cocaine usage? Not often. Maybe if they focused on that instead of burning fields or having rats eat the evidence in the police station... maybe they could actually focus on the real issue.

Personally, I know of at least one person who sells marijuana in South Oropouche - it's not a secret (and no, I'm not a customer). Everyone knows that if you want to get marijuana, you speak to X. And don't you worry, the South Oropouche police station knows who X is as well. But X plies his product in the back by the river without worry of reprisal. So why hasn't X been arrested? Some say that there are agreements with the Police. Others say other things. But at the end of the day, aside from sale of marijuana, it doesn't seem like X has legal issues. So maybe the police simply leave him alone. And that's not just in South Oropouche - it's nationwide.

Meanwhile, rumors of police planting marijuana on people abound. Or of evidence being resold through constabulary redistribution.

It seems to me that the Police Service and courts have better things to do than deal with this particular issue. I imagine that decriminalizing marijuana would decrease the case load on the courts and make the possibility of police planting evidence even more remote.

Or we could just wait around and see who else's grandmother gets arrested for simply being near some marijuana.

Or are the powers that be too stoned to figure this out on their own? Could be.

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