In a hard hitting letter to Cannabiz Africa, Gareth Prince (pictured here at the Cannabis Expo)n said his urgent court application to halt cannabis arrests, was a result of government’s failure to deliver justice to the ‘dagga’ community.
The application, bought by Prince and the Rastafarian National Council on , will be heard again in the Western Cape High Court on Monday, 8 June 2026, after the judge gave the State more time to respond.
Prince has called for a mass turnout of the cannabis community at the court in Cape Town’s Keerom St from 9 am on Monday to support the legal challenge. The two part application seeks firstly an immediate halt to cannabis related arrests, while the second part challenges the government’s entire cannabis and hemp legal framework.
Jeffery told the Cheeba Cannabis Summit in Sandton on 29 May 2026, that although he supported the first part of Prince’s application to halt cannabis arrests, the second part of his application could scupper the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act (CfPPA) and set the reform process “back to square one”.
‘The executive has failed us’
Prince, who is chair of the SA Cannabis Development Council SACDC) and a respected Rastafarian elder, acknowledged Jeffery’s plea that the court action could set back legislative efforts and hamper progress in the in the cannabis industry.
But the man whose name is ultimately associated with the legalization of cannabis in South Africa (the Constitutional Court’s 2018 Prince Judgement) rejected Jeffery’s last-ditch appeal to compromise.
“We are going back to court because the executive and the legislature have failed to provide us with effective and meaningful relief, for us to enjoy our rights”, he said.
“The dagga community have been waiting for more than eight years for justice and we are prepared to wait a bit longer; because the CfPPA does not deliver the justice our community deserves, and is quite frankly, a slap in the face of our community.”
In his letter, Prince says that despite having “participated diligently in the legislative process” this turned out to be meaningless.
‘Public participation was a sham!’
“The public participation process was a complete and utter sham, a tick box exercise. Parliament did not adhere to its own public participation framework of adequate public participation or meaningful public consultation”.
“Government took decisions on their own and then reported those decisions to us. That is dictation, not consultation. We should have been part of the conceptualisation and development of the new laws from the outset if government was genuine in making a just dagga law.”
“The CfPPA is deeply flawed on procedural and substantive grounds. It does not serve the interests of the dagga community, but demands to be served. It doesn’t have anything positive to say about dagga or our community and it in fact perpetuates the racist mentality of seeing us through the lens of criminality, as opposed to culture.
Prince said: “Instead of empowering us to enjoy our rights it has found new pathways to downpress us, like using our children to further restrict our rights”
‘Cannabis Act should be replaced in its entirety’
“The CfPPA provides no legal source of cannabis and specifically prohibits dealing. A legislative regime that purports to guarantee rights to use, possess and cultivate dagga, and which absolutely prohibits dealing and which make no provision for a legal source of dagga, leads to what Canadian Appellate courts called, ‘a legal absurdity’, he said.
“This contradiction has been observed by many in the industry and shared with the legislator, right from the start of the legislative process, but it was ignored in the final product” says Prince
Prince says the CfPPA was ill-conceived and should be replaced in its entirety.
“The Department of Justice should never have drafted the new cannabis law, and the new law was never meant to only cover privacy as this contradicts the dictates of the chapter on co-operative governance, and our constitutional jurisprudence. Alcohol is regulated by DTIC and Cannabis should also be regulated by them as is the plan with new all-inclusive bill”.
Prince said the ‘dagga community was within its constitutional rights to challenge Government: “We respect the rule of law by not taking the law into our own hands, because we are confident that reason will triumph over force.”
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