Civil society mobilises to end Zuma presidency

March in Cape Town to be held on 7 August

By Zoe Postman
30 July 2017

Activists met in the Central Methodist Mission Church on Greenmarket Square to mobilise for a march on 7 August. Photo via Facebook (photographer unknown)

#UniteBehind held a public meeting on Saturday at the Central Methodist Mission Church on Greenmarket Square in Cape Town to prepare for mass mobilisation in support of the recall of President Jacob Zuma.

AmaBhungane journalist, Micah Reddy, explained the #GuptaLeaks and its implications for democracy. The city’s biggest civil society movements participated in the meeting, using the opportunity to mobilise for a “People’s March” to be held on 7 August in advance of the no confidence vote in Zuma in Parliament scheduled for 8 August. The march will demand that Zuma be recalled by the ANC. Large protests are expected to take place in Johannesburg on 8 August as well.
Reddy, one of the journalists recently attacked by (almost certainly) Gupta-funded Black First, Land First (BLF), spoke about two examples of “abuse of power” by the Gupta family and the government. The first example was the extravagant Gupta wedding and the second was the Transnet tender awarded to a Gupta linked company.

The R30 million wedding was funded by Free State Provincial Government’s budget to start a community dairy farm. According to the #GuptaLeaks emails, several well-known businesses were instrumental in the money laundering process. Among these is one of the “big four” auditing firms, KPMG, who wrote the R30 million off as “business expenses”. [This is not an isolated example of KPMG turning a blind eye to corruption. Read this. - Editor]

Reddy explained that this was an important example of how corruption has a direct impact on communities who are supposed to benefit. [Other multinational companies to be implicated in the Gupta corruption include consulting firm McKinsey, and German software firms SAP and Software AG. - Editor]

Reddy also explained the second incident, which highlighted the method the Gupta family uses to benefit from foreign investment. Tequesta Group Ltd, a company owned by a Gupta affiliate Salim Essa, entered into an agreement with Chinese South Rail (CSR). Tequesta’s mandate was to land the tender for CSR to supply Transnet with over 1,000 locomotives. As a result, the Guptas earned R5.3 billion in kickbacks and R10-million from each R50-million locomotive that Transnet was buying. “I asked my friend to do a calculation of how many social housing units can be built with R5.3 billion. R5.3 billion can build 53,000 RDP houses”, said Reddy.

While the #GuptaLeaks have been reported extensively in the mainstream media, during question time, a member of #UniteBehind urged Reddy to bring this information to communities, by which was presumably meant townships and poorer areas in the country. He explained that some people may think #GuptaLeaks is a politically motivated ploy against the ANC if the information is not explained adequately.

Zackie Achmat, who co-founded the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and is helping the #UniteBehind effort, used an analogy to explain the scale of the Gupta corruption: “It’s like going to a bank, but you don’t rob it. Instead, you go to the big bosses and steal money from everyone’s bank accounts”.

Another member of the audience said that the post-apartheid government has been captured by a minority once again: “Maybe we should do what we did to get rid of the apartheid regime”.

A member of Equal Education raised the issue of access to education and jobs for the youth. She explained that there are children in communities who complete matric but are unable to find jobs or access education due to the failure of government to create opportunities for the youth.
Towards the end of the mass meeting, Equal Education, Right2Know and Social Justice Coalition encouraged people to mobilise and participate in the upcoming march. Vuyisa Mbayi, Organising Coordinator of Equal Education, said that this is a “fight against corruption” because corruption diverts money away from education.

Vainola Makan, from Right2Know campaign, urged people to act against the state capture. “We didn’t allow it for PW Botha and we won’t allow it for any president”, he said.
Axolile Notywala, Secretary General of SJC, concluded the meeting by saying people need to march to tell the government: “We elected the ANC, not the Gupta family”.

According to a report circulated on WhatsApp by Achmat, there are many efforts underway by at least 16 organisations to mobilise for the march. The march will start at 3pm on 7 August at Keizersgracht Street.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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There are dangers behind giving South African MPs the right to a secret ballot

South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng making a ruling on secret ballots in Parliament at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg.
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

It happened as many suspected it would. South Africa’s Constitutional Court ordered that, despite the Constitution’s silence on the matter, the speaker of parliament has the constitutional power to prescribe that a vote on a motion of no confidence in the country’s president may take place by way of a secret ballot.

It also found that Baleka Mbete, the speaker of South Africa’s parliament, was mistaken when she decided earlier this year that she did not have this power. The court set aside her decision.

But the court didn’t go as far as the United Democratic Movement, and other opposition parties that had challenged Mbete’s decision, had hoped. It would not force Mbete to order a secret ballot in the upcoming motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma. It felt that this would go against the separation of powers, by unduly prescribing to parliament how it should carry out its functions.

Accordingly, the court ordered Mbete to retake the decision on whether to allow the secret ballot. It emphasised that in doing so, she must act rationally. It ordered that she has to take account of all surrounding circumstances, including the possibility that MPs may feel intimidated by their political parties to vote in a particular way.

The court emphasised that parliament has a constitutional obligation to hold the executive to account. Members must therefore act in accordance with their constitutional obligations, their consciences and their oaths of office.

From a constitutional law perspective, the court’s stance is undoubtedly correct. As always, it has shown great respect for parliament’s power to guide its own processes. At the same time, the court has clarified the extent of the speaker’s discretion in a way that aims to ensure that she, and parliament as a whole, exercise their powers in a way that is consistent with their constitutional obligations.

What the opposition asked for was always going to be a long shot. Wanting a court to order the speaker to exercise a discretion that is legitimately hers alone, before she has even applied her mind to the question, would involve a real stretch of the separation of powers.

So, what will Mbete decide? And will her decision, if it was to go against a secret ballot, be challenged? More pertinently, ought it?

Competing notions of accountability

Many believe that a decision not to hold the vote secretly would simply be a thinly veiled attempt to shield Zuma from accountability. Such a decision would therefore, if not irrational and unconstitutional, at least be unconscionable. But, as the Constitutional Court acknowledged, there are different, and perhaps competing, notions of accountability at stake here.

On the one hand, the dominance of the African National Congress (ANC) in parliament and its own internal structures of political accountability have seemingly compromised the constitutionally designed accountability of the executive to parliament. An open ballot could only exacerbate this.

On the other hand, a secret ballot would sacrifice MPs’ accountability not only to their party peers, but also to the country’s citizens.

How can we be assured that an ANC politician who votes differently under a secret ballot than she would under an open one is doing so based on her conscience rather than on some other, less honourable whim? What is to stop a cynical group of Democratic Alliance (DA) opposition politicians from voting in favour of retaining Zuma because they believe that his continued scandal-prone presidency would better serve their chances in the 2019 election? Would it not make it more difficult for such politicians to subvert the public interest in these ways if the citizenry, and their fellow MPs, could see them?

Perhaps South Africa’s current political crisis is so dire that these seemingly far-fetched hypotheticals don’t matter. Perhaps they represent bridges the country should cross sometime in the future.

But making rules (and rulings), especially for the naughty kid in class, is seldom wise.

South Africa is moving into an era in national politics where the ANC is not nearly as dominant. This means that coalitions will be the order of the day. In this new era, one or two votes in a parliamentary motion may make all the difference. Will the country still think secret ballots were such a good idea?

Danger of destabilisation

Early in June DA mayor Michael Holenstein was removed by a motion of no confidence through a secret ballot in Mogale City, west of Johannesburg. Both the motion and the secret ballot were called for by ANC councillors. The ballot was granted by the ANC-affiliated speaker.

The DA and their coalition partners unsuccessfully opposed the secret ballot. As it happened, the secret ballot provided the opportunity for one of their own to betray the coalition and led to the motion being carried with 39 votes to 38.

Near-comical irony and intrigue aside, this saga illustrates all too vividly how the diminished accountability (to both electorate and party-political peers) afforded by a secret ballot opens motions of no confidence not only to a politics of conscience, but also potentially to one of backstabbing and pettiness.

On top of this, governance in Mogale City is said to be suffering as a result of the successful motion. There are fears that service delivery is being paralysed and that the destabilised, hung council may be put under administration.

The consequences of a motion of no confidence in the president will, of course, be far more destabilising. For one thing, Section 102 of the constitution requires the entire cabinet to resign alongside the president, should the motion pass. A member of parliament deciding how to vote on a motion of no confidence in Zuma is therefore also deciding whether to throw the entire national government into disarray, however temporarily.

This might well be preferable over another day of a patently compromised, Zuma-led government. But there is value in ensuring that such a hefty decision is made only after due deliberation, and is made openly and with courage of conviction. If such courage should prove to be lacking in the members of the majority party, should South Africans not be allowed to see this and to think, in turn, about the vote that in a constitutional democracy can and should matter far more: their own?

Marius Pieterse, Professor of Law, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Sherlock Holmes and the case of the forged Stradivari: did we miss a vital clue for 130 years?

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock.
Flickr/Theresa275, CC BY-SA

In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was published after a long period of rejections. The detective finally made his debut that November in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual – the story narrated as always by his faithful assistant Dr John Watson.

Long before any mention of the deerstalker, pipe or magnifying glass, Watson informed us of Holmes’s love of his violin:

That he could play [violin] pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites.

When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognised air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee.

We later discover in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1893) that this violin is a Stradivari, the Italian hallmark of violin perfection. Few readers will have thought this more than a pleasing additional dimension to Holmes’s more famous characteristics. I believe it is much more than that.

Doyle may have been using this violin to give us a vital clue to the enigmatic character of Baker Street’s most famous resident. If so, it has gone unnoticed for 130 years. Let me lay out the case one step at a time.

Fiddles and forgeries

The piano and the violin both rapidly grew in popularity in the Victorian era. No craftsman was more famous than Antonio Stradivari of Cremona (Stradivarius is the Latinised name that usually appears on the labels). Along with other great Italian names such as Amati and Guarneri, these fabulous instruments became much sought after.

Second to none.
John Stillwell/PA Archive

In many cases, however, the violins were not real. Forgers took advantage of people’s ignorance, conning those seeking the finest old Italian violins by creating cheap factory-built instruments and labelling them as masterpieces.

One notorious example was the case of Hodges vs Chanot of 1882, which exposed Georges Chanot as falsely presenting a violin as having the Carlo Bergonzi imprint. It was popular in the press and well known to the general public.

Many of these forgeries are still with us today. Walk into most local auction houses in the UK and I guarantee you will find at least one old Victorian violin, strings broken and looking a bit sorry for itself. Inside will be a label for Antonio Stradivarius or another old Italian maker. Buyers will be left in no doubt that it is a fake rather than a fortune.

Context, dear chap

Academics and fans have done much work into tracing the origins of Doyle’s stories and characters. We know Holmes was partly modelled on Joseph Bell, a surgeon and medical lecturer whom Doyle would have known as a student at the University of Edinburgh.

We know he was influenced by the Victorian public appetite for true crime and detective fiction. We see, for example, the hand of James McLevy, Edinburgh’s first police detective.

McLevy published a series of incredibly popular true-crime books in the 1860s based on cases he worked on. The way he consulted medics and scientists at the University of Edinburgh seeking new ways of solving new crimes in an age before forensics is very similar to Holmes’s near-forensic approach to detection.

More recent version.

Also exceptionally popular was James McGovan. McGovan too appeared to be a detective who had investigated the streets of Edinburgh. It only later came to light that the books were fiction, written by a well known Edinburgh violinist named William Crawford Honeyman.

The McGovan books came out between 1878 and 1884, which heavily overlaps with Doyle’s own time in the city (1876 to 1881). This makes it highly probable that Doyle was familiar with the series at the very least.

The Real Cremona

The final McGovan book is Traced and Tracked, or, A Memoire of a City Detective (1884). It includes a short tale called The Romance of a Real Cremona, about McGovan’s investigation of the theft of a Stradivari from a stately home near Edinburgh. During the investigation, McGovan interviews the owner, a Mr Cleffton, and asks about the value:

“Worth £400 – refused £200 for it the other day, [Cleffton] continued […]

"£400!” I echoed. “Is it possible you gave that sum for a fiddle?”

“No, not quite so much, but that’s its value,” he slowly admitted.

“How much did it cost you?”

“£40”, he rather reluctantly answered.

Watson tells a similar story about Holmes in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. He talks about how the detective had “purchased his own Stradivarius, which was worth at least five hundred guineas, at a Jew broker’s in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings”. Note that both instruments were bought for significantly less than their supposed value.

Another similarity is that in both stories, the violins passed through the hands of a pawnbroker. In real life, it was very common for fake instruments to move through pawnbrokers as a way of removing the identity of the forger or reseller.

In the Real Cremona, McGovan visits a Mr Turner, an “eccentric connoisseur” who “had a craze for buying fiddles which he never did, and never could, play upon”. In Doyle’s original sketched notes for his detective, Holmes was to be a collector of rare violins.

This never made it into the books in the end, yet it does say in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes “prattled away about Cremona fiddles, and the difference between a Stradivarius and an Amati”. Certainly, he demonstrated the same Victorian collector’s enthusiasm as Mr Turner.

The language that describes playing the violin is also comparable. In the Real Cremona, Cleffton comments that “some of the servants may have taken it [the stolen violin] out to have a scrape”, and that the violin was of no use to another character “for he is only a wretched scraper”. In A Study in Scarlet, Watson talks about how Holmes would “scrape carelessly at the fiddle”.

To be sure, scraping violins appear elsewhere in Victorian literature. But it is one more unmistakeable similarity with Honeyman, and at the very least illustrates how Doyle was steeped in the same Victorian context.

Deer oh deer.
Richard Peterson

Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that the McLevy story came out in 1884. This was two years after Hughes v Chanot and various other documented suspicions around classified Stradivari adverts that appeared around the same time.

As a violinist himself, Honeyman would have been particularly familiar with these cases. Indeed, in his later writings on the violin, he tells a story of a violin bought for £22 by an unwitting gentleman, dreaming it would be worth £1,000, but was actually worth no more than £5.

Case closed?

In short, the very strong implication in both the Real Cremona and the Doyle books is that the Stradivaris are not genuine. They are products of the Victorian forgery trade.

Which begs the question: if Doyle deliberately wrote this detail into the Holmes books, what was he trying to say about him? Perhaps it points to the detective as a flawed protagonist, cutting through his greatness at solving crimes to remind us he was not infallible.

Every time Holmes puffed his pipe and explained to Watson who the culprit was, there appears to have been one unsolved case under his nose that he didn’t even know about. Perhaps Doyle was laughing about it quietly to himself until his own death some 40 years later.

Rachael Durkin, Lecturer in Music, Edinburgh Napier University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

'Stranger danger' in the online and real word

Artem Oleshko/Shutterstock

The term “stranger danger” was coined as a warning to children: beware the unknown adult, proceed with caution and be very careful what personal information you reveal. The question is, do adults take their own advice? Perhaps most would be more guarded and make sure they know who they are dealing with before revealing too much about themselves. But our relationship with “strangers” has been evolving and social media has torn down some of the barriers that used to protect us.

Now a relative stranger could be a Facebook “friend” and evidence shows that sexual predators are using this to their advantage. How we transition from stranger to non-stranger relationships is a relatively unexplored strand in research, with little recognition paid to the fact that the internet has completely transformed our level of engagement with strangers.

At the same time other studies are showing how the rate of reporting sexual offences to conviction is low. A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) concluded that 1 in 4 sexual offences should have been recorded as crimes but were not. Reasons cited for this were mainly centred on poor processes for recording the crimes and transferring them on to national recording systems.

The rate of reporting sexual offences to conviction is low.
Kamira/Shutterstock

Regardless of these issues, the reporting of sexual offences is on the rise, with this attributed to increased reporting of sexual offences and apparent improved investigative responses. In the year ending March 2015, the Office of National Statistics recorded the highest figure for sexual offences since recording began in 2002, up 37% increase on the previous year. For female victims of serious sexual assaults, 16% were recorded as “stranger relationships”. Other categories included partner/ex-partner (47%) other known (33%) and family member (4%).

What is a ‘stranger’?

What is our understanding of how stranger rapes occur? Do we believe this happens within a dark alleyway, involving victims randomly chosen by someone they have never interacted with? Given that most of these attacks are perpetrated by people the victims know – as opposed to the dangerous “stranger” – do these statistics allow us to feel safe within our online social interactions? Herein lies the problem: people we know. At what point would we say we actually know someone in the online and interconnected society of today?

One in three relationships now start online. The change in how people communicate in their day-to-day lives has impacted on the “modus operandi” of sexual offenders. The online environment has evolved a “new type of sexual offender”. Police forces have recorded a six-fold increase in the number of “internet-facilitated” sexual offences between 2009 and 2014.

The vast amount of dating and social networking sites easily accessed through smartphones has resulted in the normalisation of providing personal information to strangers. Even Snapchat now allows users to share their exact location. People are able to see your every move from your home location, work, school or college.

Snapchat states that their default setting is “off” for location-sharing and users must activate it. They claim that locations can only be shared with your friends list. Given our friendship circles are continually changing and our friends lists are likely to contain people we have never met, how practical is this safety feature?

Are you being groomed?

Grooming techniques are individually tailored to meet victims’ expectations. From child sexual grooming research, we know that trust is key in developing relationships online, with boundaries slowly broken down before introducing sexualised conversations. In cases initiated through online dating that resulted in sexual assaults, sexual communication was reported in over 50% of cases prior to meeting, with online contact to first meeting occurring within a week for 43% of cases . The frequency and intensity of interactions allows victims to feel comfortable and shifts the perception of the relationship from stranger to non-stranger quicker than offline encounters.

National Crime Agency evidence reveals 72% of internet-facilitated sexual assaults took place in the victim’s home. Exploration of attack locations of 459 internet-facilitated rapists showed more than half occurred within a 1.6km radius of the offenders’ home. This differs from previous findings where offenders travelled further to their assault location in a bid to reduce the risk of identification. Is this due to an expedited transition from stranger to non-stranger, where the regular dating precautions are dismissed, with victims meeting their victims sooner and in unsafe locations?

New offenders, new crimes

Recent research exploring sexual offending within the UK appears to back this up, concluding that the typical offender profile and crime scene behaviours have changed. Stranger rapists are appearing to be less “criminogenic” – in other words, they have fewer criminal convictions. And those with previous convictions are now likely to be for more low-level offences. This new type of sex offender is also taking fewer precautions and less likely to use forced entry or violence in their sexual attacks.

The same techniques used by online sexual offenders are being employed by so-called “romance fraudsters” targeting dating websites with the intention of extracting money from victims. Around £34.4m from over 3,100 victims was recorded regarding romance fraud last year.

More needs to be done to increase the understanding of the term “stranger” and how this is defined within criminal justice agencies. More importantly society as a whole needs to start getting to grips with the term. Our interactions online are now embedded at such a young age. They have allowed us to become comfortable in revealing personal information and speeding up the relationship process at a dangerous pace.

So before engaging with new “friends” online ask yourself: is this person really a stranger? Have you transitioned them to “non-stranger” status too quickly? Are you really being safe online?

Michelle McManus, Senior Lecturer in Policing, Forensic and Applied Sciences, University of Central Lancashire and Louise Almond, Senior lecturer in Investigative and Forensic Psychology, University of Liverpool

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why the South African state needs to lose its fight against marijuana policy reform

Thousands of South Africans are calling for the legalisation of marijuana.
EPA/Nic Bothma

South Africa is among many countries facing challenges to their drug control policies, particularly around marijuana, known locally as dagga. The Medicines Control Council is developing guidelines for production for medicinal use and the country’s highest drug policy guardian has recommended broader decriminalisation.

The key battle ground, however, is in the courts.

A new trial is due to start in which the state is likely to expend considerable energy trying to prove that marijuana use is seriously harmful. If this is indeed the substance of its argument, it should lose. The point isn’t whether marijuana causes harm, but whether criminal prohibition is the best way to address those harms.

South African Police Service statistics suggest that most anti-drug activity is against those in possession of small quantities. These are people who are unlikely to play any strategic role in drug supply, and whose deterrence or removal from the market has little prospect of having any impact overall.

The legal wrangle to date

The first recent knock to prohibition came in 2016 with a ruling by the Constitutional Court. The court held that the constitutional right to privacy was unjustly violated by parts of the country’s drugs and drug trafficking act that allowed a law enforcement officer to stop and search any person, property or vehicle on the grounds of “reasonable suspicion” of violation of the Act. The ruling meant that police would no longer be able to enter and search private properties without a warrant.

A bigger challenge came from the Western Cape High Court. This case was brought inter alia by Gareth Prince. Prince lost a case in the Constitutional Court in 2002 that sought exemption from the laws on the basis of his Rastafari religion.

Prince’s more recent case sought not just an exemption based on religious freedom, but to challenge marijuana prohibition overall on various grounds – including that it was based on an irrational distinction from alcohol. Ras Prince brought the case with Jeremy Acton, leader of the Dagga Party.

Judge Dennis Davis, for a full bench, found that the criminalisation of marijuana within the home unjustifiably limited the right to privacy. He concluded that the state had failed to show that criminal prohibition was the least restrictive way to deal with the problems caused by marijuana. The order was suspended for 24 months to allow parliament to amend the relevant laws.

The state quickly indicated its intention to appeal and to continue enforcement without any change. But it seems that several people charged with marijuana crimes have received stays of prosecution pending the outcome of the legal process.

A separate case is about to kick off in Pretoria. Myrtle Clarke and Julian Stobbs, known as the “The Dagga Couple”, have turned their arrest for possession into a decriminalisation crusade. Their team has raised funds for local and international expert witnesses to help them make their argument that the criminal prohibition of marijuana is irrational, wasteful, and unjustifiably infringes numerous constitutional rights.

This is the first time that the issues will have the chance to be properly aired in court.

It’s long overdue.

Pattern of arrests

According to the South African Police Service’s annual report, there were 259,165 recorded counts of illegal drug possession or dealing in 2015/16. These charges resulted in 253,735 arrests, accounting for almost a sixth of all arrests.

A Rastafarian lights up during a march for the legalisation of marijuana in South Africa.
EPA/Nic Bothma

Most drug arrests are made through stop-and-search or roadblock operations. National figures aren’t available but those from two of the nine provinces suggest that a vanishingly small proportion of drug charges (2%-4%) are for dealing as opposed to possession of drugs. Very few drug arrests are made at ports of entry, through special operations, or through the Serious Organised Crime Investigation Units.

Between 65% and 70% of drug charges are for possession of marijuana. The presumption is that possession of over 115 grams (about 4 ounces) constitutes dealing. This means that every year police seek out and charge about one in every 300 people for possession of an amount of marijuana​ that weighs no more than an apple.

Criminal prohibition

It isn’t clear whether criminal prohibition is an effective way to dissuade or help drug users. Evidence from other countries suggests that, generally, the greater the perception of risk, the lower the prevalence of use.

shutterstock

But the strength of this effect is debatable to say the least, and it remains far from clear whether a liberalisation in marijuana policy results in a significant increase in its use or in associated harms. The effects of the recent wave of marijuana policy changes in various US states, for example, are still being closely observed and debated.

For people who have highly problematic drug use patterns, there is even less consensus that the threat or reality of imprisonment is an appropriate or effective tool for either dissuading or helping them. Other approaches may well do significantly better.

Decriminalisation

There are many models of decriminalisation. Policies that work in the Netherlands or Colorado might not work in a developing country like South Africa given differences in drug use, drug market and price structures, regulatory capacity and political climates.

The goal must be to find a broadly acceptable balance of a complex range of harms, benefits, and rights in the context of limited resources.

For example, South Africa needs to consider what impact decriminalisation would have on small-scale, informal farmers who depend on the crop for their livelihood. Legalising marijuana could mean that they are forced out of the market by large agribusinesses, or falling prices.

On the other hand, prohibition arguably does more to harm the current producers and distributors than consumers.

The right balance won’t be found if marijuana is simply cast as a devastating alien threat to the nation’s children and communities. Instead it needs to be understood as a socially and economically ingrained pastime for which there is clearly considerable popular demand.

Harm is not enough

Justifying the criminal prohibition of marijuana is not a matter of proving that it causes harm. Evidence of major harm has not been enough to lead to the criminal prohibition of, for example, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, firearms and unprotected sex.

The case that needs to be made is whether criminal prohibition is effective, proportionate, and the minimally invasive way to address those harms. The state will struggle to prove this. An increasing number of countries have concluded that it is not.

Anine Kriegler, Researcher and Doctoral Candidate in Criminology, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.