Don’t criminalise our traditional recreation

Earlier this month, Joe Biden pardoned some 6,500 individuals convicted of ‘easy possession’ within the US. This can be a first and welcome step in the direction of a assessment of US federal legislation clubbing marijuana with harmful Class A medication equivalent to heroin. In the identical month, in Karnataka’s Udupi district, Manipal Police registered 43 instances in opposition to college students of assorted schools for the leisure use of marijuana.

The irony is eager. The US was the driving power behind the singular method to all ‘medicine’ on the 1961 Single Conference on Narcotic Medication. Although against classifying hashish with exhausting medicine, India lastly gave in to sustained US strain and enacted the Narcotic Medication and Psychotropic Substances Act 1985.

The legislation criminalised the fruit and flower of hashish however not the leaves used for making bhang, and its possession and consumption is just not unlawful. The Karnataka incident appears to counsel that many components in India’s legislation enforcement system appear to be going the wrong way in contravention of the nation’s personal conventional liberal relation with the leisure use of marijuana. For starters, the scholars ought to by no means have been hauled up smoking ganja.

On the United Nations in 2020, India voted to take away hashish from the listing of most harmful substances. It is smart that it practises at house what it stands for internationally. Decriminalising hashish may also allow tapping the market potential of cannabis-related merchandise – timber, textile and drugs.

A number of states like Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh have regularised hashish cultivation for restricted use. Gujarat not classifies bhang as intoxicant. Until hashish is decriminalised, it would stay a helpful instrument for rent-seeking and harassment.