Despite the rain, May Day saw about 120 people make their way to the closed gates of Parliament in Cape Town. This was South Africa's attempt at joining 160 other cities in the Global Marijuana March.
The numbers were telling of the obscurity of the dagga debate but did not nearly represent South Africa's estimated 1-million smokers.
The turn-up was nevertheless colourful: barefooted youth with little hope in their eyes rolled joints while soft-skinned beauties with dirty hair brandished "legalise it" posters. Rasta brothers with bling-bling outfits zealously shared their views with a journalist from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Numerous self-styled gurus clutched research documents on dagga as an alternative energy resource, dagga as medicine, and dagga for building houses. Joints, bottled water and ganja muffins were passed around while the police kept their pose.
Rightly so, says organiser of the march, Andre du Plessis, because there is more to dagga than dope.
The emphasis on the narcotic qualities of a herb that for centuries has been a matter-of-fact feature of life in southern Africa, has obscured its economic potential as a source of oil, paper, fabrics, the ingredient for soaps and wax and - mixed with lime - as a cheap, strong brick.
This potential, Du Plessis and others argue, highlights the need to think differently about a substance that is the subject chiefly of criminal investigation, while taking too much blame for social ills. At the end of last year 4,269 people found themselves in South African jails for the use or possession of cannabis, and 1,207 for the trade or cultivation of cannabis.
Yet the focus is on waging what is arguably an apparently wasteful war on an "enemy" that just won't go away. The sums involved are immense. Just last year, the SA Police Service's organised crime unit seized about 5,038kg of dagga from individuals, 99,939kg from traders and 754,913kg from plantations. This excluded cannabis confiscated by uniformed police.
Cannabis, for the police, has the lure of a siren: Parliament was told last year how Philippi residents, having failed to get attention from the Nyanga police to report a rape case, fabricated a "tip-off" about a stash of dagga. The police sent five cars. But for all their bravado, police seem to be fighting a losing battle. An estimated 1-million South Africans regularly break the law with impunity. And raids fail to reduce the demand. A decline in supply merely means consumers have to pay a bit more.
And that bit more doesn't go to the rural growers, whose livelihood often depends on their crop, but to drug lords. Some argue that more vigorous policing of the dagga trade, far from curbing its use, hikes profits and indirectly stimulates syndicate crime.
Prohibition has created a black market. Why, then, was dagga made illegal in the first place?
Was it because it posed a health risk?
Was it because it threatened the textile industry?
Or because international conventions compelled South Africa to outlaw it?
The answer is complex, and in many ways obscure. Assumption-buster Du Plessis, a systems engineer in the IT industry, has been pursuing the answer since 1998. He found that the initial reason for outlawing dagga had nothing to do with the plant's narcotic qualities, but with the threat it posed to cotton and other industries.
Numerous laws on dagga in the 20th century were possibly racially discriminatory, and thus - or so Du Plessis thinks - unconstitutional. When Minister of Information Connie Mulder introduced the Dagga Act in 1971, he described dagga as a national emergency, arguing that white army conscripts would be demotivated, and social interaction between black and white youth would occur, if dagga was not criminalised.
Du Plessis also found out that, if legalised, cannabis could take its place as a competitive product in the petrochemical, construction, paper, pulp and textile industries. Believing that dagga could significantly contribute to reducing the housing backlog, and generate jobs, he set out to share his findings, to spread, as he puts it, "propaganja". He was not well received.
In 2001, Du Plessis approached the Innovation Fund with a proposal as thick as a Bible. In light of the housing shortfall, estimated to be 400,000 units per year, he pointed out that houses could be built using bricks made of shredded cannabis stalks - or hurd - and lime. The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, which then managed the fund, thought he was crazy.
According to Du Plessis, it would be possible to build a hurd-brick house three times the size of a typical RDP house, for the same price. Besides being cheaper, bricks made from cannabis are, he argued, stronger, more sound-proof and a better thermal insulator than clay bricks. Du Plessis says his vision of a socially-uplifting cannabis industry was seen as nothing more than the pipedream of a dopehead. Hoping to inspire dialogue around cannabis, Du Plessis led a similar march last year and handed over a petition of 800 signatures to Western Cape Public Protector Gary Pienaar urging the government to rethink their "fundamentalist" approach to dagga. He has yet not heard from the authorities. This year's march, he says, was to remind government that the sharing of information with the people was an essential part of democracy.
Ten helium balloons filled with hundreds of dagga seeds were released into the air. They were supposed to pop at altitude. But with the help of the wind, they ended up unspectacularly in Parliament's gardens. Du Plessis was not concerned. For him it was a sign that, one way or another, dagga would get government's attention.
Eastern Cape administration spokesman Manelisi Wolela says approval has been given for cultivating 2,000ha of hemp. The Department of Trade and Industry has promised R55-million for a hemp-processing plant.
The province's hemp specialist, Monde Fotana, hopes the research permit for the project will in time be extended to a commercial permit. The department is also working with Mercedes-Benz in the hope of supplying the car manufacturer with hemp fibre for door panels and biodegradable dashboards. Ultimately the department hopes to persuade the Department of Health to de-schedule "hemp" from the cannabis schedule of drugs and to introduce "industrial hemp regulations".
Key laws are the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act of 1992 and the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act of 1965 which state that cannabis is illegal: the whole plant or any portion or product thereof, except dronabinol. Dronabinol is the pharmaceutical name for the active compound THC ( tetrahydrocannabinol ), which has been patented and sold as Elevat and Marinol to combat nausea following chemotherapy and to boost appetite in anorexics and HIV-positive patients.
Given that THC is the only legal part of the plant, it is odd that it is the level of THC that is decisive in seeds being permitted for research. THC is indeed responsible for producing the "high" when cannabis is smoked, but the level of THC as a means of differentiating between cannabis grown for smoking ( dagga ) and cannabis grown for industrial purposes ( hemp ) is arbitrary and artificial.
The seeds approved by the Medicines Control Council for the Eastern Cape research project have a THC content of less than 1% and are of European origin. At 4 euro per kilogram and 50kg per ha, this will cost the government over R3-million a year, a price they say they will pay until farmers become established in the market, or until the Agriculture Research Council ( ARC ) develops a South African hybrid with a European level of THC.
Because of the commercial considerations, and the patent and intellectual property rights involved, the development of new varieties is a secretive business. Despite pressure from certain interest groups, including Du Plessis, the research council has not published any evidence of progress. Fotana says such information is only shared with "responsible" farmers. After applying for a research permit, the council supplied "responsible" farmer Russel de Beer with 750kg of European seeds which were planted in 2002 and 2003 on his farm in Northwest Province.
It was a failure.
De Beer says that "the ARC throws stars in your eyes". He simulated rural farming and did everything by hand but found that, because the European cannabis needed to be fertilised and irrigated, it would not be commercially viable for rural farmers. As the European seeds were acclimatised to 18 hours of sunlight in summer and the South African sun provided only 13, De Beer found they delivered poor-quality hemp.
Local varieties, producing more THC because of the shorter exposure to daylight, are more resistant to boll-worms and stink-bugs, and can be harvested twice a year. De Beer believes the best seed for cultivating hemp should have a South African origin.
In the hope of "helping the rural farmer to have real power in the market", he began researching the creation of a native hybrid, which could meet industrial demands. But he ran into trouble: unexpectedly, his permit failed to come through, and he was arrested, appearing in court on April 19.
Samples of De Beer's "suspicious" crop are being analysed at a forensic sciences laboratory to determine the level of THC.
The ARC is to give evidence in the case at the Brits Magistrate's Court on June 10. Meanwhile the exploitation of this valuable and prevalent shrub remains the monopoly of druglords. Many argue that more effective monitoring of any negative effects of dagga abuse will be possible if it is legalised, partly by destroying the allure of doing something forbidden.
It will also free cannabis to take its place in the economy as a versatile commodity.
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