Towards social justice and economic empowerment? Exploring Jamaica’s progress with implementing cannabis law reform

Abstract

The Dangerous Drugs Amendment Act (DDAA) 2015 positioned Jamaica at the forefront of international cannabis law reforms in the developing world. The DDAA legalised and regulated commercial cultivation and sale of cannabis for medicinal and therapeutic use, legalised home cultivation and decriminalised personal possession of cannabis. This dramatic policy change came after years of discriminatory drug law enforcement and multiple attempts at cannabis law reform motivated by social justice and cannabis activism. Drawing on ethnographic observations of the implementation of the DDAA and interviews with key cannabis policy stakeholders in Jamaica, we discuss the extent to which the social justice ideals behind the law have translated into practice on the ground. Our analysis focuses on two dimensions of social justice relevant in drug law reform: (1) penalisation and criminal record expungement policies, and (2) economic empowerment and the distribution of wealth (ie the diversity within the new cannabis industry and the transition of traditional illegal ganja farmers to the new legal cannabis economy). Reflecting on the first five years of implementing the DDAA in Jamaica, we explore social justice achievements under the DDAA and discuss persisting structural barriers to economic justice and how they could be addressed.

Keywords:

• Cannabis policy
• marijuana legalisation
• Caribbean
• equity
• social justice
• decriminalisation

Acknowledgements

We thank all stakeholders who agreed to be interviewed as part of this research.

Disclosure statement

AK received support from the Global Drug Policy Observatory at the University of Swansea. MR has no conflicts of interest to declare. She has never received funding from cannabis, tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceutical industry. MAE provides paid technical consultancy services on cannabis cultivation methods for licensed medicinal cannabis companies in Jamaica.

Notes

1 The displacement of public health measures by repressive criminal justice interventions was acknowledged as a widespread phenomenon in many countries by a former secretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC 2008).

2 Bob Marley lighting his ‘spliff’ or Peter Tosh’s demand to ‘Legalise it’ have reverberated around the global reform movement. Cannabis continues to be a central theme of Jamaica’s contemporary musical culture, capturing both the pleasures and the injustices of the world.

3 Contrary to the expectations of the colonial administration, liberated slaves did not return to work on the plantations for a wage, instead turning to subsistence farming in occupied ‘squatted’ land.

4 Babylon is a term for rebellion against the will of Jah (God) but is often used in reference to corrupt government and the material manifestation of the colonial, capitalist and European-dominated order.

5 The US continues to have colonial possessions – US Virgin Islands, quasi dependencies and Puerto Rico – and has led covert and overt military interventions in the sovereign states of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Grenada.

6 The threat was made before the report had even been officially published (Klein 2001, 223).

7 ‘The Conference of Heads also recognized the need for further scientific investigations with a view to arriving at a clearer understanding of the values that underlie the social choices that lead to criminal behaviour and endorsed the recommendation of the Joint Meeting of Attorneys General and Ministers responsible for National Security which in reviewing the report prior to its submission, called for more work to be done to ascertain the types of societal values and attitudes which result in behaviour breaching the Rule of Law. Aware of some of these contradictions, the Joint Meeting of Ministers recommended that drug abuse be treated primarily as a public health issue with emphasis on emphasis on the reinforcement of values. The Conference of Heads endorsed this’.

https://caricom.org/communique-issued-at-the-conclusion-of-the-twenty-third-meeting-of-the-conference-of-heads-of-government-of-the-caribbean-community-3-5-july-2002-georgetown-guyana/

8 Opinion polls regularly confirm that the majority of Jamaicans believe the police to be corrupt and do not trust their version of events during critical incidents (Johnson polling), while the Transparency International corruption perception index ranks Jamaica at 69th out of 100 countries.

9 For example, the cultivation licence fee for an area of less than one acre is set at 2000 USD, compared to 3000 USD per acre for licensees cultivating areas of more than five acres, with further options to waive or defer the licence fee (Botec Analysis 2015; CLA 2020a).

10 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=JM; note that the rate in Colombia is 37 per 100,000.

Additional information

Funding

AK’s travel was supported by the Global Drug Policy Observatory at the University of Swansea, UK. MR received funding from the Marsden Royal Society of New Zealand (MFP-MAU1813).

Notes on contributors

Axel Klein

Axel Klein, PhD, has been working for over 20 years on Caribbean policy. A UK-funded review of treatment facilities led to the 2002 decision by CARICOM Heads of Government to approach drugs as a health issue. Subsequent projects established treatment and community service as an alternative disposal of drug ‘offenders’ in the Eastern Caribbean. A social anthropologist, his policy work was always combined with and informed by field research among, inter alia, cannabis farmers in St Vincent and drug street markets in Trinidad and St. Lucia. An advocate of harm reduction and cannabis legalisation, he has been in open debates with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and other promoters of a repression. At the Global Drug Observatory, he has led the work on cannabis regulation in Jamaica and is waiting for new contributors to update his Caribbean Drugs: from criminalisation to Harm Reduction (Zed, 2004; with Anthony Harriott and Marcus Day).

Marta Rychert

Marta Rychert, PhD, is Senior Research Officer at the Shore & Whāriki Research Centre, College of Health, Massey University, New Zealand. Her work lies at the intersection of health, policy and law, with a particular focus on drug policy, cannabis law reform and regulation of other psychoactive products including alcohol, new psychoactive substances (NPS) and new drug delivery systems (eg vaping). Her research in cannabis policy space seeks to understand socio-legal challenges in transitioning from illegal to legal cannabis economies, with a view to inform effective design of public health regulations that capture the benefits of reform while avoiding negative effects of large-scale commercial markets. She is the Principal Investigator for projects funded by the New Zealand Health Research Council and Marsden Royal Society of New Zealand. Prior to her academic appointments, she worked in the European Union Drugs Agency (EMCDDA) in Portugal.

Machel A. Emanuel

Machel A. Emanuel, PhD, is Lecturer and Researcher, and Principal Investigator of the Life Science Cannabis Research Group, in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica. His research team conducts research in the area of tropical horticulture for Cannabis sativa, and its application, consistency, efficacy and quality control throughout the cannabis value chain. He is the Vice-Chair of the Bureau of Standards Jamaica Cannabis Technical Committee for the development of standards for the Jamaica cannabis industry and Chairman of the Product Development, Cannabis Industry Development Taskforce Sub-committee. In 2015 he was the second place winner in the Best New Style Farming Category at the High Times World Cannabis Cup held in Negril, Jamaica.