A former Member of Parliament for Kumbungu Ras Mubarak believes the Supreme Court Justices that struck out the legalisation of marijuana cultivation in the country should have sought for more knowledge on the issue rather than making their “idiosyncrasies and biases” take a better part of them.
The then MP who was part of the legislature that passed the law for marijuana to be cultivated in Ghana says because the judges lack insight in the distinction between the type of the substance that is smoked and subsequently abused by people and its form required for industrial and medicinal purposes was the reason such a decision was taken.
He alleges the membership of a Justice on the Narcotics Control Commission might have influenced their biases on the ruling.
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“We’ve met every single requirement by law, we’ve met all the standards and I find the reason for which the Supreme Court said that the passage of that amendment as very spurious, it’s most unfortunate. These justices, I can tell you that they have one of the justices of the Supreme Court once worked on the Narcotics Control Commission. Their biases on decriminalising cannabis for medicinal and industrial purposes are public knowledge. You can’t use your own idiosyncrasies and biases to make judgement about things that will greatly help the country,” he told Alfred Ocansey Wednesday, May 24, 2023 on Ghana Tonight.
He detailed the purpose of the bill which was to promote industrial use of the product rather than its abused usage by smokers as some of the Justices might have assumed.
He asked the Supreme Court to “go to any pharmacy, go to any hairdressing saloon and you will find cannabis products in these places be it eye drops or hair enhancements creams, you’ll find them in pharmacies. Are they saying that we should round up all of these pharmacies that have products made from cannabis to prosecute them, is that what they are suggesting?”
“The bill as was passed by Parliament was seeking to decriminalise the use of cannabis only for industrial and medicinal purposes, it is not for recreation and I think some of these justices are completely out of touch they don’t even understand the difference between recreational cannabis and medicinal cannabis and neither do they understand the differences in terms of the components.
“I mean what we approved in Parliament in 2020 cannot be smoked, it is synthetic and if you’re a judge at the superior court and you don’t understand anything what you seek is to get some more knowledge about it, there are a lot of experts in and out of the country who could have advised them,” he elaborated.
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