Chair of the South African Cannabis Development Council chairperson Gareth Prince said that in December 2024 he had personally dealt with up to 10 cases of people arrested on the West Coast Road.

He told Daily Maverick that police appeared to be targeting people on the N7, on their way to either Clanwilliam, Citrusdal, Springbok and Klawer (“which seems to be a notorious point where people are stopped simply based on them having cannabis”). 

Prince said the amounts of cannabis confiscated “ranged from 200 grams to two kilos. People are simply arrested for being in possession, whereas, in terms of our law, you can only be arrested if there is an objective suspicion that you are dealing in cannabis”.

He added that it was a wilful and deliberate violation of the law when people were arrested for simply being in possession of cannabis.

“People get arrested. They get held for 48 hours, and then they get released without appearing in court. They get released without any court date and without them being restored of their cannabis.

“Basically, police rob these people of their cannabis,” Prince said.

He said the Rastafari community had experienced numerous instances since 2018 of unlawful arrests and this kind of conduct by the police.

“The arrests just continue. [In] the quarterly crime stats reports from SAPS, you will see that ever since the judgment, they continue to report cannabis arrests as drug arrests, so they indiscriminately lump cannabis with other drugs, thereby continuing the narrative that cannabis is part of the illegal drug trade,” Prince said.

Prince’s complaints were among others taken up the SA Human Rights Council which called for a halt to cannabis arrests over the festive season. It plans to convene a ‘round-table’ with cannabis stakeholders and senior officials from the criminal justice cluster next month. The SAHRC said it received not only complaints from the Cape West Coast but from the Free State and Gauteng where Rastarian communities were targetted.

“We hope that this roundtable will lead to a holistic solution that is in line with the spirit of the Constitutional Court’s decision and the intention of the legislature (to allow the personal possesson and consumption of cannabis)” SAHRC commissioner Tshepo Madlingozi said.

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