Guest column by Rory Blake Taylor (pictured here)
South Africa has already settled the constitutional question.
In 2018, the Constitutional Court made clear in Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development v Prince that adults could use and cultivate cannabis in private without criminal sanction.
Parliament later enacted the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act, 2024, and in February 2026 the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Development published draft regulations on possession, cultivation and expungement for public comment.
Yet nearly eight years after the court ruling, the country is still defining private-use limits while the commercial framework remains largely absent.
Liquor Licensing Model Would Have Been a Good Place to Start
This is no longer a story of caution but of avoidable policy failure. South Africa could have moved faster by adapting regulatory structures it already understands.
A practical starting point would have been the country’s liquor licensing logic: simple categories, a split between national and provincial oversight, public notice, premises checks, renewals, transfers and enforceable operating conditions. Instead, government has chosen complication over execution, leaving the market exposed to discretion, delay and corruption.
This matters because the industry already exists, whether the state approves of it or not. Every year of delay means lost tax revenue, lost exports, lost jobs and a deeper mismatch between law and reality. South Africa is agriculture-capable on a meaningful scale, and cannabis is one of the rare sectors that can generate jobs across the spectrum, including low-skill and rural work.
Govt is Losing Money on a Daily Basis
The government’s most obvious incentive should be money in. Instead, the fiscus continues to lose value daily while the country slips behind jurisdictions that moved earlier and more decisively.
The contradiction is obvious. Policymakers speak about growth, industrialisation and export opportunity, yet most legal participation remains concentrated in the medical and export segment under the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA). That pathway is structured like pharmaceutical licensing, with high compliance costs, specialised controls and barriers that make sense for medicine but not for the broader commercial market South Africa is supposedly trying to unlock. In practice, the easiest legal route is still the one least accessible to small-scale and traditional growers.
Cut the Pretence, One Pathway Can’t Carry a Whole Sector
If South Africa is serious about commercialisation, it should stop pretending that one expensive compliance pathway can carry the whole sector.
The right approach is a tiered licensing model. At the top end, keep the existing pharmaceutical route for medical products, GMP manufacture and export. Alongside it, create a mainstream commercial framework with distinct licences for cultivation, processing, transport, wholesale distribution, retail dispensaries, testing and on-site consumption clubs.
That is not radical. It is how functioning regulated markets are built: clear categories, proportionate rules and licensing that matches actual business activity.
Licensing Should Recognise Scale
Licensing should recognise scale. A large export greenhouse, a small outdoor farmer, a co-operative packhouse, a processor turning biomass into extracts, and a neighbourhood adult-use outlet do not present the same risks and should not face the same burden.
South Africa should borrow directly from the logic used in liquor: national registration for large-scale manufacturing and wholesale activity, provincial licensing for retail, clubs, micro-processing and local distribution, and simple municipal checks on zoning, safety and nuisance. Rethink the Kasi licence opportunity now
At grower level, barriers to entry should be low. That means low-fee cultivation permits, simple registration, basic record-keeping and compliance support rather than a wall of legal and technical costs. Small farmers should be encouraged to participate through co-operative structures that aggregate volume, standardise quality, improve bargaining power and make compliance affordable.
Co-ops should be allowed to run or contract mobile processing units so farmers in remote areas are not locked out by distance from drying, trimming, testing or first-stage processing facilities. The goal should be to protect value at farm level, not drain it out of the system before product even reaches market.
Tax policy should follow the same logic. The state should resist extracting revenue at the point of cultivation, where margins are thinnest and entry barriers matter most.
Instead, tax should be concentrated where value is added and easier to audit post-processing, branded manufacturing, wholesale movement and point of sale. If government wants both compliance and revenue, it should make legal participation cheaper at the bottom of the chain and more formal at the top. That is how you bring people in rather than push them out.
Private Clubs Should be Legitimate Channels Not Tolerated Loopholes
Retail access must also be honest about how the market works. Dispensing should be straightforward for adults, with licensed outlets and properly regulated private membership clubs operating as legitimate channels rather than tolerated loopholes.
Clubs should be allowed where they meet clear rules on age restriction, sourcing, record-keeping, on-site consumption and taxation of any retail component. They are not a side issue. In the absence of a broader lawful adult-use market, they have become one of the strongest real-world mechanisms through which consumers, growers, processors and service providers are already trying to structure exchange.
Enforcement must change immediately. Small-scale cannabis arrests should stop while the country finalises a supportive commercial regime, because continued criminal enforcement against ordinary participants in an acknowledged market is not regulation; it is institutional contradiction.
The point is not to create disorder or to abandon standards. It is to align police practice with economic policy and constitutional reality, and to reduce the corruption risk that thrives where law is vague and discretion is wide.
Most importantly, the eventual law must include the whole route to market. From cultivation and aggregation to processing, transport, clubs and retail, every legitimate role in the chain should be recognised. A legal system that protects only the capitalised end of the market will preserve illegality by design. Inclusion is not charity; it is the only realistic path to shrinking the black market.
Align with Legacy Systems, Don’t Bulldoze Them
South Africa is not starting from zero. The value chains are already here, built over decades by growers, traders, transporters, processors, club operators and consumers who kept the market alive long before policymakers discovered its potential. The sensible path is not to bulldoze those systems in the hope of replacing them with an overengineered ideal. It is to align with them, support them and bring them into law in a way that protects participants from corruption rather than exposing them to it.
That means recognising local scale properly. The Gogo growing sun-kissed, seed-filled dagga (majat) should matter as much in law as the polished craft grower or the well-funded operator who already knows how to navigate compliance. The entire route to market, from seed to sale, or from Legacy Farmer to Kasi Snyman, should be protected in legislation. Whether product moves on the back of a donkey, in a taxi or through a formal distributor, the law should care about safety, traceability and fair participation — not about pretending only one kind of operator is legitimate.
If inclusion is the goal, then co-operatives should sit at the centre of the model from day one. They are the obvious mechanism for aggregating bulk, sharing compliance costs and giving small growers bargaining power in a market that would otherwise swallow them. Co-ops can also support mobile processing units, reducing access barriers for farmers who are far from drying, trimming, testing or first-stage processing infrastructure.
The same principle should apply to cultivation limits and plant numbers. South Africa does not need a restrictive grow model that suffocates the market before it matures. Regulation should focus on standards, product safety, channel control and tax collection where value is added — not on choking production at the point of entry.
Private membership clubs must also be recognised honestly for what they are: not a loophole, but a genuine route to adult recreational use in a country that still refuses to build a full adult-use framework. There should be no punitive access tax on membership itself. The lawful focus should be on how product is sourced, processed, dispensed and consumed, and on how value is created along that chain.
The Dagga Market is a Living Reality, Will the Law Ever Catch Up
And yes, perhaps the time has come to say it plainly in the language of this country: Cannabis may be the polished policy word, but Dagga, Dagga, Dagga, is the South African reality, and it captures something the bureaucracy keeps missing. This is not an abstract future industry waiting to be imagined into existence. It is a living local economy. The only serious choice left is whether government will continue to fight, delay and overcomplicate it, or whether it will finally regulate it in a way that is lawful, inclusive and built for the market that already exists.
The market is already here. The question is whether the law will ever catch up.
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