CANNABIS FOR PRIVATE PURPOSES BILL READY TO LEAVE PARLIAMENT

CANNABIS FOR PRIVATE PURPOSES BILL READY TO LEAVE PARLIAMENT

• 24 February 2024
• Parliament
• SA Legal Academy

The NCOP Committee on Security & Justice has completed its work on the Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill, a ‘B’ version of which is now waiting to be passed by the House. It will then be sent to the President for signature.

According to a committee report tabled in the NCOP, no further amendments were necessary.

Introduced in 2020, revised by the National Assembly’s Justice & Correctional Services Committee and passed by that House in November 2023, once operationalised among other things the Bill will:

• require that the authorities to ‘respect the right to privacy of an adult person to use or possess cannabis’
• ‘regulate the use or possession of cannabis by an adult person’
• ‘prohibit … dealing in cannabis’, and
• ‘provide for the expungement of criminal records of persons convicted of possession or use of cannabis or dealing in cannabis on the basis of a presumption’.

This is according to a memorandum on the revised Bill’s objects, which notes that – in this context – the Bill also:

• responds to a 2018 Constitutional Court ruling on defects in:
  • the Drugs & Drug Trafficking Act, 1992, and
  • the Medicines & Related Substances Act, 1965
• responds to a 2022 Constitutional Court ruling requiring ‘an alternative manner by which to address the issue of the prohibited use, possession of, or dealing in, cannabis by children, with due regard to the best interest of the child’, and
• provides for the commercial production of hemp.

Please click the links below for more information:

• Bill’s ‘B’ version
• parliamentary papers (page 40)

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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