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Dagga for medicinal use – by the end of 2016! The IFP wants the urgent enactment into law of the private member’s Bill tabled by its respected and longstanding MP Mario Oriani-Ambrosini before he succumbed to cancer in 2014.

Activists take steps to prevent SAPS helicopters destroying marijuana crops.

The South African Police Service (Saps) has insisted that its rural dagga eradication programme is lawful and complies with local safety and environmental regulations.

Police helicopters spray marijuana plantations every year

In the rolling hills of South Africa’s Pondoland, Cannabis sativa – marijuana, known locally as “dagga” – has been grown for as long as people can remember, in part because they have few other options to earn an income.

Before medicinal cannabis can be made more widely available, even for conditions such as chronic pain in which the evidence of benefit is strongest, policy-makers will need to consider issues such as the safe supply and regulation of medicinal cannabis, the best routes for administration (including issues of dosage), cost-effectiveness and, at a later stage, issues such as the development of criteria for selecting patients who are eligible for medicinal cannabis.

In a policy brief published by the Medical Research Council on January 5, the medicinal value of cannabinoids was officially – and historically – recognised in South Africa. Three days later, the president signed into law the Medicines and Related Substances Amendment Act of 2015, a piece of legislation that theoretically allows Big Pharma to feed our dagga to us in pill form – or, if we like, through a straw. KEVIN BLOOM reports.