BRIAN LIGOMEKA, Blantyre | Monday
THE home of the Malawi Cob – a type of marijuana enjoyed by dagga connoisseurs worldwide – is under pressure from Rastafarians to legalise the intoxicating herb.
There’s only one problem. Statistics at Zomba Mental Hospital, Malawi’s only mental asylum, indicate that six in every ten mentally deranged people admit to smoking marijuana.
Rastafarians are seeking assistance from the Ombudsman to help them legalise dagga, which they say is used as part of their religion, but he’s not too keen to be of help because of the mental effects of the herb.
“Our sole mental asylum is already crowded with people who have become lunatics because of hemp,” explains Ombudsman Enock Chibwana.
He admits the Malawi Constitution provides for religious freedom, but says: “I cannot fight for a group of people who would like to increase the number of lunatics in this country.”
The Rastafarians may have an ally in former deputy agriculture minister, Joe Manduwa, who earlier this year asked Parliament to legalise the cultivation of hemp to meet the slump in global tobacco prices following the World Health Organisation-sponsored anti-smoking lobby.
Tobacco is Malawi’s most successful legal export.
“It’s high time Malawi resorts to growing hemp to boost its foreign earnings,” said Manduwa.
Agricultural hemp would not have the same intoxicating effects of dagga, but Presbyterian minister Reverend Makuleya warned that legalising hemp would invoke God’s wrath and he said the Rastas’ call was “absurd and evil”.
Malawi’s Penal Code criminalises the cultivation, possession and trafficking and smoking of the weed and has been used to jail one Rastafarian, Rasta Jadda, for two years, fuelling Rastafarian calls for the legislation of dagga.
Police figures indicate a sharp rise of confiscated dagga from 1500kg in 1990 to about 60000kg today.
Most traffickers are arrested for trying to smuggle marijuana into Zimbabwe and Zambia from Malawi.
Soko says marijuana is widely grown in Nkhotakota district in central Malawi – an area reputed to produce the best marijuana in the whole of southern Africa.
Kwatha Chitanda, executive director of Youth Arm Organisation, a local human rights organisation fighting youth drug and alcohol abuse, says marijuana is the most sought after drug by young people.
“To some it symbolises a new generation of free thinking, relaxed and untamed individuals in the society,” he said. – African Eye News Service