On Small Quantities Of Ganja :Bunting To Police “turn A Blind Eye”…

At the 72^nd Annual Joint Central Conference of the Police Federation held at the Hilton Rose Hall, National Security Minister Peter Bunting told police to sim­ply “turn a blind eye to peo­ple smok­ing weed”.
Presently the Police are not allowed to arrest offend­ers who have small quan­ti­ties of mar­i­jua­na. A small quan­ti­ty based on the recent Amendment is  two ounces of the weed.
The new amend­ment makes two ounces and under a tick­et-able offense rather than an arrest-able offense. The prob­lem is that the Government has not made tick­ets avail­able to the police so the Minister’s direc­tive to the police is sim­ply to “turn a blind eye”.

The Jamaica Observer report­ed that Opposition Spokesman on National Security Derrick Smith, in his address to the con­fer­ence, described the Government’s amend­ment to the Dangerous Drugs Act as an added load to mem­bers of the police force.“The recent amend­ments to the Dangerous Drugs Act, decrim­i­nal­iz­ing the use of gan­ja, are noth­ing but addi­tion­al, unnec­es­sary bur­den brought to bear on

the backs of police,” Smith argued.
Under Jamaican laws the police would be mired in the morass of mak­ing on the spot deter­mi­na­tions whether an offend­er should be tick­et­ed or arrest­ed. This would be a colos­sal waste of police resource at a time when seri­ous crimes are trend­ing upward.
Of course the only way the police would be able to make those assess­ments as it relates to weights, would be to have scales.
You guessed it, they have no scales. Engaging in this ven­ture would cer­tain­ly get the police lost in the weeds[pun intended].

On the face of it, the aver­age observ­er would see this as a vic­to­ry for users of mar­i­jua­na. They would be right. Whats the big deal in police ignor­ing peo­ple smok­ing or pos­sess­ing small quan­ti­ties of the weed?
The sim­ple answer is that there is a two-fold answer to that question.
♦Jamaicans are to a cer­tain degree not par­tic­u­lar­ly respect­ful of the rule of law , or worse those who enforce the laws. This could be a prob­lem with smok­ers of the weed with bad atti­tudes, believ­ing they have been per­se­cut­ed by the prover­bial “Babylon“may very well see this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to blow some smoke in a “di police bway face”,this is a recipe for dis­as­ter , this will not go down well with police.
Justice Minister Senator Mark Golding recent­ly urged Jamaicans not to make a mock­ery of the police or the law, mak­ing it clear that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion should not be con­fused with the Government pro­mot­ing gan­ja smoking.
Hold that thought.……

The bar­ri­ers sur­round­ing Cannabis are crum­bling around the world as more and more stake-hold­ers point to what they believe are med­i­c­i­nal val­ues from the use of the weed. But when an Administration Minister say to us “decrim­i­nal­iza­tion should not be con­fused with the Government pro­mot­ing gan­ja smok­ing”, it not only gives us pause but offers a per­fect segue into the sec­ond point.
♦ The Government has oth­er motives behind this issue, even though there is evi­dence the walls around Ganga use are crum­bling world-wide.

The rela­tion­ship between police and Jamaica’s under-class has been a testy one for decades , there is not much love lost between the par­ties. Though not con­fined to the use of Cannabis, the rela­tion­ship has not been helped by the laws which pre­vi­ous­ly gave police wide pow­ers of arrest of per­sons hav­ing even minus­cule amounts of the weed.
Jamaica has a large Rastafarian com­mu­ni­ty which large­ly deter­mined that the weed is some kind of holy

sacra­ment. They fun­da­men­tal­ly hold the belief that the coun­try’s laws on Cannabis ought not to include them based on those beliefs. Additionally there is a huge cross sec­tion of young unem­ployed male who use the weed. Not to be out­done many farm­ers plant the weed as a mat­ter of course, even though they may not con­sid­er them­selves Ganja-farm­ers per sey.

When you add all of the fore­gone the Administration of Portia Simpson Miller under­stands full well that there is a huge wind-fall of good­will to come from the decrim­i­nal­iza­tion of the weed. That poten­tial good­will may con­tin­ue for years as poor,uneducated peo­ple point to the PNP as the par­ty in touch with their desires and needs. Ah come on why would they not have tick­ets for the police , if as Minister Golding pro­claim the Administration was not pro­mot­ing Ganga use?
How con­ve­nient that there are no tickets !!!
In I972 Michael Manley swept to pow­er on a raft of pop­ulist promis­es. The imple­men­ta­tion of those poli­cies cre­at­ed tremen­dous neg­a­tive upheaval in the Jamaican soci­ety and for the econ­o­my. Many of the poli­cies were not bad poli­cies, how­ev­er the dog­mat­ic imple­men­ta­tion of those poli­cies cre­at­ed after shocks still being felt today.
Today there may be some feel-good moments for some to say “well what about these”?

♦There are no bas­tard chil­dren anymore.
♦ Poor peo­ple have tak­en back some of the lands from the old colonialists.
So too have Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe but the coun­ty, once Africa’s bread-bas­ket is now a basket-case.
Rampant pover­ty and hunger has turned Zimbabweans into refugees.
♦Micro-dams. Project land-lease. Free edu­ca­tion. Everyone equal. Jamal.etc.…
♦ Did the end jus­ti­fy the means?
It most cer­tain­ly did not, in terms of mate­r­i­al val­ue to the country.
However inso­far as the PNP is con­cerned, this list of sweet tast­ing cot­ton-can­dy-type reforms” cre­at­ed a cult-like fol­low­ing of the mass­es toward the PNP which has remark­ably kept them in office for 28 of the past 40 years.
The PNP not a par­ty to miss an oppor­tu­ni­ty, clear­ly sees this mar­i­jua­na sub­ject as anoth­er water­shed issue which will cement their hold on pow­er exponentially.
Unfortunately for the Opposition JLP there is not much it can do from the pow­er­less oppo­si­tion benches.