Dr Shiksha Gallow drew the attention of delegates at ICS 2026 in Cape Town to the high risks consumers were facing in the absence of guidelines covering cannabis retail and the fact that authorities had no control over what was being sold.
She said she had personally been presented with two cases of cannabis-related safety issues in the Eastern Cape: one of a child who was hospitalized after consuming the mother’s THC gummies, and another instance when an elderly woman required treatment after consuming a 100 mg THC cookie for pain that she had purchased from an illicit outlet.
Dr Gallow said that she was also aware of a case where a woman who was feeling ill after consuming cannabis gummies tested positive for fentynal, even though she claimed never to have taken the drug.
Giving the keynote address on The Cannabis Paradox: How Lack of Regulation Harms Communities at UCT’s Law School on 28 June 2027, Dr Gallow said these were recent examples of an unregulated retail cannabis industry veering out of control and posing extreme health risks to consumers.
Consumer protection should be top of mind
She said regulators had to understand that a prevailing market dynamic was that ‘potency drives up profits’ and that the public needed to be protected.
In particular, edibles needed to be regulated because of their attractiveness to children, slow onset of effects – which led to over-dosing, and lack of accurate product labelling.
Dr Gallow said synthetic cannabinoids were making an appearance on the market and these posed their own set of harms. She said a lack of information and public awareness had led to hospitals having protocols for ‘cannabis overdoses’, “and we all know that full plant cannabis medicines do not result in overdoses”.
She said that while regulations were urgently needed for cannabis retail, the other harms being done by the lack of guidelines were to sideline indigenous knowledge systems (IKS).
“The system has to include African traditional medicine, where cannabis has been used for generations for pain relief, menstrual comfort, anxiety and other ailments, usually in combination with other plants such as artemisia” she said.
Misuse of Section 21 is adversely affecting medical cannabis
Dr Gallow said the misuse of Section 21 of the Medicines Act by many ‘Grey Zone’ outlets was adversely affecting the development of a coherent medical cannabis system in South Africa
Dr Gallow said that clear regulations would help define the cannabis adult use sector from the medical sector and allow them both to develop along their separate pathways.
No doubt about the medical benefits of cannabis
Dr Gallow said the benefits of medical cannabis had been proven beyond doubt, and cited her own research in using cannabis to replace opioids in the management of chronic pain. She said that cannabis users coming off opioids showed a marked improvement in suffering from pain, slept better, were less anxious and generally had a better quality of life.
She said there were several other studies that showed how cannabis helped in the treatment of breast and prostate cancers as well as reducing the side effects of chemo-therapy.
“Nobody can say medical cannabis does not work for pain. It does” said Dr Gallow.
The East London-based doctor speaks from experience in how miraculous cannabis can be.
She recounted to delegates how she and her husband Wayne suffered traumatic injuries in a motorcycle crash several years ago, after which doctors said he would never walk again. The hospital and doctors worked with Dr Gallow to treat her husband with medical cannabis, and within one month, he was able to walk out of rehab in crutches. Fifteen months later, Wayne Gallow successfully completed a swim around Robben Island off the Cape Peninsula.
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